Source Daily Telegraph
By Dr James LeFanu (Filed: 28/05/2006)

Complementary therapies can certainly be pretty half baked, both in theory and practice, or as a group of “prominent doctors” put it earlier this week in refreshingly robust prose: “unproven treatments of no demonstrable benefit”. And while they conceded it was important to keep an open mind (“we must remain open to new discoveries”), it should not be so open that our brains fall out.

Fair enough, but the view from the coalface of the doctor’s surgery is rather different, where it is not unusual to encounter patients who insist that they have been much helped by homeopathy or acupuncture or whatever.

What is more, most family doctors over the past 20 years, have incorporated several principles of alternative medicine into their own practice – the first and most important being that there is not necessarily “a pill for every ill”.

The singular virtue of “the alternatives” is that its practitioners are not permitted to prescribe drugs, so must resort to non-pharmacological means of treatment.

Thus, whereas the family doctor will hand out the standard regime of painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs for their patients with acute back pain, they would acknowledge that osteopaths and chiropractors can do a lot better: correcting the underlining defect in the vertebral column with a vigorous clunk-click of spinal manipulation.

It is a similar story with gut disorders, such as irritable bowel, long dismissed as psychosomatic by orthodox medicine, whose standard therapies of anti-depressants and a high fibre diet not infrequently compound the symptoms of abdominal discomfort and bowel disturbance.

Now, family doctors hopefully know better, recognising – as naturopaths and others have long maintained – that the cause may well be intolerance to some food or other where a change of diet can bring near instantaneous relief.

The complementary therapies have the further virtue of being a cautionary reminder that Western science does not have all the answers.

How can it be that twiddling an acupuncture needle between the toes can cure a migraine headache – an effect that so clearly defies any physiological or anatomical explanation?

And then, of course, they have the opportunity to practise “old-fashioned” medicine, talking and listening to their patients, rather than staring at the computer screen on their desks.

From all of which, one might reasonably conclude that those “prominent doctors” might usefully take to heart the Biblical admonition about motes and beams.