Alternative cures popular

Press, 1 December 1987, Page 20

Alternative cures popular

JOHN PARKER

NZPA-Reuter London The attractive young woman led the way into a white room. “Take your shoes and socks off and lie down,” she said, closing the blinds. "Now, just relax.” Then she turned on music that sounded like a waterfall, rubbed powder into her hands and began to massage my feet. This is reflexology, a so-called “alternative” medical treatment. Scorned by most doctors, alternative medicine is nonetheless growing and becoming more respectable in Britain. Even Prince Charles, heir to the throne, has said he uses alternative medicine and both the Queen and the Queen Mother favour some aspects. More and more Britons are sidestepping the National Health Service to give it a try. Reflexologists believe organs of the body are mirrored in the feet, and diseases in those organs can be found and cured by foot massage. “I can tell your liver is not too healthy,” said the reflexologist, Karen Benson, pressing a tender spot on a toe.

Ms Benson works at the new Westminster Natural Health Centre, a hospitalclean converted house in an expensive area of London offering about 15 of. the more common alternative treatments.

Nobody knows exactly how many alternative treatments are available in Britain today. There are few controls, so there may be as many treatments as there are beliefs about the workings of the human body. They range from the quasi-medical to the seemingly weird. Prince Charles argues that alternative medicine is good because it is holistic — that is, it tries to treat the whole body. Practitioners give patients more time than doctors do, and patients are encouraged to help themselves to better health.

“By concentrating on smaller and smaller fragments of the body, modern medicine perhaps loses sight of the patient as a whole being,” Prince Charles told doctors in 1982. Since then alternative medicine has grown quickly. A 1986 survey of 28,000 people by the consumer magazine “Which?” found that one

in seven had consulted an alternative practitioner in the previous 12 months. Of those who had done so, 82 per cent said they were cured or improved. In 1983, opening an alternative medicine centre for cancer sufferers in Bristol, England, Prince Charles said alternative medicine represented an invisible aspect of the universe.

“It nevertheless cries out for us to keep our minds as open as possible and not to dismiss it as mere hocus pocus,” he said.

For some people, however, the ideas behind the remedies can take some getting used to. Followers of the Bach flower remedies, for instance, believe certain flower petals give off healing vibrations that can help cure negative mental states such as indecisiveriess.

Iridology, begun a century ago in Hungary, is based on the belief that diseases can be seen in the eyes. Faith healers believe the mind can cure diseases of the body. Traditional acupuncturists, followers of the ancient Chinese art of sticking needles into people, believe the body’s

organs have humours, or moods, which respond to stimulation.

Osteopaths and chiropractics claim to cure disease through manipulation, chiefly of the spine. Homeopaths, believe a small quantity of a substance that would cause similar symptoms can cure a disease. The list goes on. These treatments are not usually available on the National Health Service, and the only insurance policy available covers only a few of the more respectable treatments.

There are no standard prices, but alternative treatments are usually cheaper than private conventional medicine because they use no modern drugs or surgery. After Prince Charles’s criticisms the British Medical Association, the doctors’ union, set up a working group.

It reported in 1986 that only osteopathy, chiropractic and some forms of acupuncture had any scientific basis, and even they were unscientific in approach. Most alternative treatments were useless, and occa-

sionally dangerous quackery.

The report said problems in the National Health Service, such as long waiting lists, had partly caused the drift to alternatives. But the most important cause was a change in patients’ attitudes.

“People expect instant cures and when they do not get them they go looking elsewhere,” said Professor James Payne, chairman of the working group.

The medical profession would not accept alternative cures until they could be proved, scientifically, to work, he said. But alternative practitioners ask, how can you measure how a person feels or the link between body and mind?

Joanna Solan, the exnurse who began the Westminster centre, said the medical profession had also, at least partly, missed the point. “It does not matter if patients go out and chew grass and feel better, so long as they feel better,” she said.

“Anything that alleviates symptoms on a longterm basis, I do not think can be called quackery.”