The Other Medicine: Programme 6

FORD
Research into complementary therapies is still a fledgling business that attracts furious debate. But more studies, placed within a scientific context, are showing that some therapies not only have clinical benefits over existing treatments but can be hugely more cost effective too. Scott Middleton is a chiropractor and spokesperson for the British Acupuncture Association.

MIDDLETON
The recent study published this year has shown including chiropractic in the medical system doesn’t increase costs, it decreases costs. It means there are fewer MRI scans done, fewer x-rays done, there are fewer patient visits to the doctor, fewer drugs used, fewer side effects of drugs therefore fewer cases of surgery. And if you look at the overall picture it’s not the cost saving to the health providers or the insurance companies, it’s also the cost saving to the economy because fewer people are off work, they’re back to work quicker, studies have shown that if a patient’s off work for six months only 50% ever go back to work, if they’re off work for one year 5% go back to work. In one study in Ontario they found that if they doubled the number of patients consulting a chiropractor in the first instance the saving for eight million people in Ontario would be $1.85 billion - the saving is massive.

FORD
The financial arguments are far from settled but with some CAMs at least, they look strong. But in an ideal world, money shouldn’t be the driving goal for integration. Take cancer care, where complementary therapies are increasingly seen by staff, as well as patients, as desirable not just to improve the quality of life of patients but as beneficial for staff. Kate MacKenzie is a nurse and massage therapist at the Bristol Cancer Help Centre.

MACKENZIE
For me it’s what nursing is all about. It’s about having the time to be with people and to truly understand what their experience is about. So I’m not just seeing somebody as Mrs B with a certain cancer. Cancer has so many ramifications in people’s lives so it’s going to have an impact on their employment, which may have an impact on the financial side of their life and so you know they’re no longer the accountant or the solicitor or the sales assistant they once were, so what am I? Who am I? Not being able to be the mother that you would like to be because you’re feeling tired and you can’t go and pick your children up from school. Lots of emotional issues, social issues. And here we can address all of those issues, it’s not just the medical side of things but also the whole mind, body, spirit and emotional aspects of what it’s like to go through a cancer experience. Traditionally nurses use much more care and touch and if you look back at Florence Nightingale and some of the texts that were around then there’s a lot of work around massage and touch and there’s a lot more of the word of love and care. And sadly I think a lot of that is lost, not because nurses don’t care but because they don’t have the time to do so.

FORD
It would be wrong to suggest that NHS nurses and doctors are not interested in the quality of life of their patients. But it is a struggle for them to provide this care under the present system.

HEALER
I became a healer over a period of some time but I became interested in healing because my mother had ovarian cancer and she went to the Bristol Cancer Centre and received some healing there. And whilst I was in the room with mum I got very warm, I got very flushed and my hands started to tingle and after the session was over I sort of commented on this to the healer and that healer said everybody can potentially channel energy but the way that you’re feeling gives me the insight that you could channel energy very well.

FORD
Healers are, collectively, the largest body of CAM therapists in the United Kingdom - with around 15,000 practitioners. Producing objective scientific evidence that the powers of spiritual healing work is a difficult process, to say the least, and one that leaves many scientists deeply sceptical.

Nevertheless, thousands of patients turn to this form of supportive care. And they’re being helped by clinicians like those at University College Hospital who were the first to offer a healer on the NHS, she was Angie Buxton King. Who then sadly found that her skills were needed on her own son Sam, diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia - or AML.

BUXTON KING
Right from the start Sam of course responded by losing his hair but he didn’t respond by getting ill - he was having massive doses of chemo, which is common for AML, you have to be an in-patient the treatment is so toxic - and he was running around on the ward with a cheerful face, water pistol in his hand which was a 10 ml syringe and generally he was well and the other children were not. So I knew that there was something profound going on although at that point I was using so many other things I couldn’t really pinpoint it to healing. About a year after Sam died I felt very much that I wanted to try and offer other patients the help that Sam had had so I approached Great Ormond Street, which is where Sam had been treated, and they kindly gave me an hour of their time and I talked to the medics but they didn’t want to pick up on it. But I then went to University College London Hospital and said the same thing and for some reason the door swung open on a trial basis, I was given a month to prove a need and if the need was proved then they would think about paying me.

FORD
So just tell me what you do for a typical patient.

BUXTON KING
Typical patient - most of our patients have their own rooms and so I’ll walk in, I’ll introduce myself and my therapy to them and I explain to them that it’s a hands on treatment which they simply have to lie in their beds to receive and that’s all I tell them. And then when the session is finished I rouse them and we discuss what they've felt or seen if anything.

SMITH
My name’s Justine Smith and I’m from Stevenage in Hertfordshire. I first met Angie when I was in the UCH hospital receiving treatment. I was having extensive chemotherapy at the time and Angie came into my room and offered me healing.

FORD
What was your initial reaction?

SMITH
I was - I didn’t know anything about healing at the time but I was really grateful that somebody came in to offer me something other than drugs. And I just laid on the bed and just relaxed and Angie obviously started healing and I just felt an enormous amount of calm in my body, my body just totally relaxed and various different places she put her hands I felt a lot of heat was being taken from various places and after Angie finished healing I actually felt like I had a little bit more energy.

FORD
How do you think you might have been if you hadn’t had any healing?

SMITH
I think I would have taken longer to recover. It’s helped the healing process.

FORD
It’s well known that Prince Charles has long supported the use of complementary therapies - a view that’s got him into hot water with the medical profession. His Foundation for Integrated Health has been consistently working to get the two sides of the debate to come together over integration - by funding small research projects, organising conferences, publishing papers and lobbying parliament. Michael Fox is the Foundation’s Director.

FOX
Our efforts have been devoted to encouraging government to take more action in terms of research. We published a proposed national research strategy which said please can you government prime some research. And we were very pleased that they have taken some action, they’ve taken action about trying to encourage capacity - getting more universities to do research - and they’ve also launched an initiative on cancer research, which again we think is an extremely good idea.

FORD
Do you think the government’s doing enough?

FOX
I would love them to do more, we’d love to see more money being spent on research.

FORD
Compared to the millions which is spent on pharmaceutical research - it’s infinitesimal.

FOX
It is small. I think what was however important that in terms of legitimising research the action by government in funding research was a major step forward.

FORD
If CAM were integrated into the NHS could they afford it - could they afford all the treatments that people would want?

FOX
Not if the answer was in addition to what it’s doing. A different way of looking at it is the health service needs to change the shape of what it’s doing at the moment. And I think complementary medicine - the use of complementary healthcare - can help it do it. There are 17½ million people with chronic diseases in this country, potentially complementary healthcare has a major role to play with helping people live with their diseases and that might actually reduce the burden on the health service.

FORD
Now you said that your foundation is very much in favour of integration, do you hear very strong arguments from anybody against integration?

FOX
I sometimes hear an argument that says that the evidence base is only an emerging one so are we moving too fast? But I don’t - not sure that that’s going to stop us all from using complementary and conventional healthcare together - we’re doing that at the moment, so let’s be pragmatic and realistic about this and help with decent information about what’s going on.

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