allopathetic

English

Etymology

From allopathy +‎ -etic.

Adjective

allopathetic (comparative more allopathetic, superlative most allopathetic)

1. Involving or based on allopathy; allopathic.
   • 1843, James Braid, Neurypnology, page 246:

     Mrs B., the mother of a family, had been subject to epilepsy for seven years, and notwithstanding every variety of treatment, allopathetic and homœpathetic, she had an attack at least once a month.

   • 1883, Emma Jane Worboise, “Clare’s Welcome”, in The Abbey Mill, London: James Clarke & Co., […]; Hodder & Stoughton, […], →OCLC, page 386:

     The allopathetic doctor, he allowed stimulants; and the homypathetic man, he advised cocoa and weak tea; and the water-doctor would hear of nothing but water, which naturally she is averse to, having scarcely tasted it in all her life.

   • 1979, Charles Jennings, Mark Tager, Whole Person Health Care and Directory of Northwest Practitioners, page 308:

     The use of drugs in the modern practice of medicine is allopathetic in nature. The use of purely natural agents in an allopathic manner is now sometimes referred to as "alternative allopathy."

   • 2004, Mark Perry, Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America, page 187:

     “Summing up the case from an allopathetic standpoint," one medical journal noted at the time, "the man is ignorantly or willfully blind who fails to see that President Garfield's case has been the most grossly mismanaged case in modern history, and his surgeons are guilty of a deliberate attempt to throw the burden of a glaring incompetence upon Providence, rather than leave it where it justly belongs."

   • 2016, Dr. Louis Gordon, The ‘Mystical’ TCM Triple Energizer:

     With regard to the true natural healing practices of Hippocrates versus the practices of allopathetic medicine, it is truly ironic that Allopathic medicine claims Hippocrates of Cos as the 'father of medicine' when the practices of the allopathic school of medicine go totally counter to many of his most prized paradigms.

Usage notes

This term is used more rarely than the synonym allopathic. Some authors use only the term allopathetic, and treat it as a synonym of allopathic. Others, however, use both terms, employing allopathic to refer to conventional Western medicine, and reserving allopathetic to refer more specifically to the use of medications that produce the opposite effect of symptoms.