Homeopathy For Women Today

COMMENT: Michael Ellis and Julie Zilko | September 27, 2008

from: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24402620-23289,00.html#tools-share

COMPLEMENTARY medicine regularly receives sceptical treatment in the media. An example followed the announcement by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners in June that it planned to introduce a sub-faculty for “integrative medicine” — combining both Western and complementary methods — which would accredit and educate doctors.
 

Illustration: Michael Perkins

Yet many of the articles that appeared covering this news pointed out that nearly 70 per cent of Australians have sought at least one type of alternative solution to their medical problem each year. These include acupuncture, mind-body medicine such as hypnosis and meditation, and evidence-based nutritional and environmental medicine.

The most common users are higher-educated and higher-earning women in their middle years who are suffering from chronic or painful conditions. In fact, one story reported that in 2005 Australian spending on alternative medicine was $4.13 billion — more than was spent on prescription drugs in that year.

The question is, if western medicine works, then why do nearly three-quarters of the population seek alternatives? The answer is simply because there are no real solutions to chronic medical problems apart from drugs that mostly provide intermittent relief at best, and rarely cure the problem.

The reason there is such strong antagonism towards complementary or integrative medicine is the power of the pharmaceutical lobby, particularly in the US.

According to a 2007 report by the US Center for Public Integrity, congressmen are outnumbered two-to-one by lobbyists for an industry that spends roughly $100 million a year in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses to protect its profits. As a result, the US has the highest cost of prescription drugs in the world.

It is well known that adverse affects from pharmaceutical drugs, or illnesses caused by drugs or technological intervention, are such that the treatment of such illnesses is now the fourth most-common cause of death in western society. In fact, an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) as far back as 2000 showed that contrary to doctors being the panacea of patients’ medical problems, it is in fact doctors who are the third leading cause of death in the US — killing 250,000 people every year (JAMA 2000;284(4):483-5).

Arguments put by opponents of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is that there is no scientific evidence that these work, and that they have not undergone the rigours of scientific examination.

This is, patently, nonsense. There are tremendous advances in complementary and alternative medicine occurring in Europe and the United States, spearheaded by the Ivy League Harvard Medical School Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies, and Cornell University’s Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, as well as the University of California in Los Angeles.

In addition, leading peer-reviewed medical journals have published supplements or special issues examining research and practice of CAM, including JAMA, the American Journal of Public Health, and Academic Medicine.

Additional studies by medical doctors now supplement the thousands of studies by CAM researchers and botanical scientists already published in scientific journals, bringing the issue of CAM as a group of parallel, much-practised medical systems to the forefront despite the best efforts of opponents to these medicines. In the US, The Office of Alternative Medicine, currently operating as the National Center of CAM, has a budget of more than $150 million per year. While nowhere near the funds financing the pharmaceutical lobby, it is a recognition that complementary and alternative medicine is a valid and powerful force in directing efforts to find genuine cures for medical problems.

The Quality in Australian Health Care Study (QAHCS), published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1995, reported that 16.6 per cent of hospital admissions were associated with an adverse event. This is equivalent to 18,000 people dying each year because of medical mistakes. This is in direct contradiction of a key tenet of the Hippocratic Oath undertaken by all medical practitioners: “First, do no harm.”

One estimate of the national cost to the Australian healthcare system of just the additional hospital bed-days (as a result of the adverse events identified in 1995) is in excess of $800 million per year. Rather than quibbling over nurses’ pay, we should be fixing the system instead.

The medical system in Australian and Western society functions as an anonymous, alienating machine in which the hospital is structured like a factory — with its aim to be as economically viable as possible without any relevance to healing in the absolute sense in our consumer society.

The new medicine, however, encompasses a healing approach, which sees the individual as mind, body, and spirit and also as an aspect of community, environment and culture.

Doctors need to be aware that their prime objective is to be healing agents. Doctors have an obligation to support the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners introducing an integrative medicine faculty.

It is doctors’ duty to recognise healing in its truest sense and help patients find true and long-lasting relief from chronic pain and anguish.

Dr Michael Ellis is a Melbourne-based GP with a special interest in alternative and complementary medicine. Julie Zilko is a Melbourne-based writer with a masters degree majoring in medical and business ethics.

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