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Performing a U-turn of a boldness, nature and magnitude which must leave
even the most highly accomplished retortionists of our own dear present
government gasping with envy, the British Medical Association has issued a
report which acknowledges that various unorthodox therapies, like
acupuncture and osteopathy and homeopathy and herbalism, are indeed a ‘good
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Going even further, the report recommends that the ‘proper doctors’, who
form the association’s membership, should be better informed about all this
dissident doctoring, and should feel free to refer their patients to
practitioners of ‘alternative’ forms of treatment, just so long as they are
satisfied that the acupuncturists and osteopaths and homeopaths and so on
are properly qualified members of their crafts.

Incredible! So what happens now? Let us imagine the scene.

‘Well, Mrs Dokpawn, I’ve been reviewing your case and you do seem to have a
few problems. You have a heart valve which is rather narrower than it ought
to be and it leaks a bit. I’m afraid that sooner or later this may lead to
heart failure. Then there’s the hip. You say it hurts, and stops you
sleeping or climbing the stairs or going anywhere. That’s because the
joint’s a bit arthritic and I fear, left alone it can only get worse. And
then there’s the diabetes, and the trouble you have with your gastric ulcer,
which is not only painful but tends to bleed from time to time, and that’s
making you anaemic, and might even kill you one day. And of course, as a
result of all this, you are a bit depressed.’

‘Yes, doctor.’

‘So what are we going to do with you?’

‘I don’t know, doctor. I mean, it’s up to you doctor. You know best, I’m
²õ³Ü°ù±ð.’

‘Yes, yes. Well now, if you’d come to me a couple of months ago I’d have set
about getting your maturity-onset diabetes under control with an oral
hypoglycaemic agent, and at the same time I’d have put you on cimetidine to
clear up that gastric ulcer and an antidepressant to make you feel better
about it all. Once we’d got you into better shape I’d have sent you to a
heart surgeon to see about having that valve replaced, and when you’d
convalesced from that operation you’d have been pretty well fighting fit
and we could have seen about fixing you up with a new hip.’

‘My goodness, doctor, I’m not sure I’d have the strength to go through all
that. Specially since I’ve not been feeling too well lately. If you know
what I mean.’

‘Ah! But you won’t have to ‘go through all that’, as you put it, Mrs
Dokpawn. As I said, that’s the programme I would have suggested a couple of
months ago. The good news is that since then everything has changed. You
see, we doctors have been rabbiting on about the practice of medicine being
an applied science for far too long, and this has blinded us to the fact
that a touch of good old-fashioned sorcery and mumbo jumbo can be just as
valuable, therapeutically speaking, as all your fancy modern pharmaceuticals
and surgical legerdemain. What’s more, it comes a damned sight cheaper – a
matter of no small importance to a budget-holding general practitioner such
as myself. And all this is official. My trade union has just said so.

‘So I think we’ll get an osteopath to tackle your hip and go to an
acupuncturist for the gastric ulcer. A couple of homeopathic remedies should
cope with the diabetes and depression well enough. So we’re just left with
the heart valve. That could be a bit tricky. We might have to arrange a trip
to Lourdes for that.’

‘And am I going to get any better, doctor?’

‘That’s entirely up to you, Mrs Dokpawn. So long as you truly believe that
you’re going to get better, then you will get better. Well, you’ll think
you’re getting better. And that’s all that matters, really, isn’t it?’

‘Yes doctor. Thank you, doctor.’

I may, of course, have slightly overestimated the effect on orthodox
doctors of the BMA’s professed conversion to a belief in the virtues of
complementary therapies is likely to have, but it is a most remarkable
volte-face.

Way back in 1982 Prince Charles, as a fleeting president of the BMA, told
his medical audience that ‘The whole imposing edifice of modern medicine,
for all its breathtaking success, is like the celebrated Tower of Pisa,
slightly off balance.’ He urged members to handle their clients as whole
persons rather than bodies attached to a disease. And a few months later, in
a valedictory message, he openly invited the association to take note of,
and think upon, the successes achieved by the practitioners of fringe
medical techniques.

So the BMA did set up an inquiry into complementary medicine to determine
whether there could possibly be anything in it after all. When asked why his
brotherhood were suddenly paying serious attention to techniques it had
derided in the past, the chairman of the inquiry lamely explained that ‘If
you elect someone president of your organisation, you have a duty to listen
to what they have to say.’ But that particular inquisition did nothing to
temper the disdain felt by the proper doctors for their unconventional
competitors, and as recently as 1986 the BMA was still describing the
growing interest in dissident doctoring as ‘a passing fashion’.

So what has changed in the past few years to justify this remarkable
apostasy? Not the nature of the fringe techniques. Not the principles of
medical science. Is it possible that the proper doctors’ original
condemnation of the fringe was inspired not so much by a respect for the
scientific method as a wish to discredit the competition? And is it possible
that the Pauline conversion just now announced is due not to the discovery
of hitherto unrecognised virtues in the dissident doctoring techniques, but
to a shocked realisation that a ‘passing fashion’ is attracting ever more of
the proper doctors’ rightful customers?

It can’t be a case of ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’, can it? Proper
doctors aren’t like that, are they?

Donald Gould is a former editor of New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ.