Programme One: Why is CAM so popular?

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4
Tuesday 21/09/04 2100-2130

PRESENTER:
ANNA FORD

CONTRIBUTORS:
JULIA FARRANTS
DIANE SEYMOUR
ANNA REWILAK
JOHN MORRISON
ROGER COOTER
GEORGE LEWITH
MICHAEL BAUM
BEN GOLDACRE
DAVID JEWELL

PRODUCER:
RAMI TZABAR

ACTUALITY - SHIATSU CLASS
Try and imagine just having all your favourite hills and …

FORD
At the Shiatsu college in North London Kim Lovelace takes his second year pupils through a warm up exercise before they start body work practice…

FORD
From weekend initiation courses to three-year degrees, thousands of people are signing up for courses in CAM - Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Universities alone account for 10,000 students of CAM. The choice is vast, with over 200 therapies practised in Britain today.

STUDENT
I had received Shiatsu for at least 10 years and have found it very helpful for my own health and wellbeing and I wanted to be able to use those techniques to work with other people. So it connected very strongly to doing a Shiatsu course.

FORD
One in four of us regularly use some form of complementary therapy every year, collectively spending well over a billion pounds. In this series, we’ll explore the personal experiences, the scientific evidence and the sometimes quite bitter power struggles at the heart of the complementary medicine boom. We ask why so many of us are attracted to complementary therapies, how they can affect our health and wellbeing and whether in the future this ’other medicine’ will become fully integrated into NHS care.

MONTAGE
CAM really is a patient revolution. Basically people are telling us that they’re benefiting from CAM.

I’ve no problems with alternative practitioners provided they don’t think they are God.

People like the individual approach, they like being treated holistically as a person, rather than being seen as a disease.

Complementary medicines just feed in to the continuation of the materialist life - I think it’s selfish indulgence frankly.

Well I just knew that it’s thousands of years old and that it can’t have gone on for 5,000 years or so and it be nonsense.

It’s like Harry Potter - it’s magic.

Patients have probably an incipient dislike of conventional medicine, and I think people find going to a doctor a non-satisfying experience.

FORD
My exploration of the CAM phenomenon started with Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire which has become a honey-pot for alternative new-age life-styles and more recently of many complementary treatments. It began attracting like-minded liberal thinkers in the early ’70s, some of whom set up communes on the moors, then bought up dirt cheap property. Its new-age appeal grew and now it sparkles with new life and dozens of cafés, health food stores and alternative practitioners of every kind.

ACTUALITY - JULIA FARRANTS AND PATIENT
[Knocking]

Come in.

Hi.

Hi Mabe, come and take a seat.

Thank you.

So how have you been doing this week?

Oh pretty good in general, yeah. I’ve been quite busy, so I’m getting a little bit tired. But generally I’m doing really well, I think I just need a bit of maintenance to keep me going.

Yes good. You’re still managing to do everything that you’ve got to do - still managing to stay in work?

Oh absolutely, I’m really enjoying my job and I’m able to do other stuff as well. But you know me, I tend to push the boundaries a little bit, so …

Yes, have you got any symptoms this week, any sore throat, swollen glands?

A little bit, a little bit of sore throat when I wake up in the morning maybe but no swollen glands this week, no.

FORD
Mabe has come to see her ’doctor’ - Julia Farrants - she’s got ME. This sounds like a normal GP appointment, but Julia is not a GP anymore, she grew tired of what she felt she could offer her patients in general practice so gave it up to retrain as an acupuncturist.

ACTUALITY - JULIA FARRANTS WITH PATIENT
Okay, can you stick your tongue out please?

Sure.

Okay, so it’s quite red at the tip, so that’ll tell me you’ve got a lot of emotional issues going on at the moment and once more - it’s looking much better than it was though. The tongue body is nice and thick, the coating is not too thick, the cracks are in the right place, so that’s quite - you’re doing quite well.

FARRANTS
The places where the needles are put are known as acupuncture points and these are centres of energy in the body that connect quite directly to different organs and different systems in the body. So by putting a needle in that point we can affect the internal energy and the internal organs.

FORD
What do people come to you for?

FARRANTS
People come for treatment with different conditions. I’ve done a little audit of the people who came to me in the last year in Hebden Bridge. Eleven per cent came with back pain, seven per cent came with ME or chronic fatigue, six per cent hepatitis C - there’s a whole list of other things - joint problems, emotional problems, insomnia, infertility, eating problems, tennis elbow, help with treatment around cancer, pregnancy and IBS.

FORD
Why did you go into acupuncture because you were a medical student weren’t you?

FARRANTS
I felt that I wanted to offer a more holistic approach, I wanted to be able to have the time to offer people - I found my personal experience of Western medical training that it was rather dehumanising for myself and for the patients.

MABE
I think what I was missing from my GP when they could no longer help me with my illness was that the therapeutic relationship between a physician and their client and you get that with acupuncture - you get that therapeutic relationship. And you also get it with more time attached to it and I think GPs are often so pushed for time, through no fault of their own, that you can feel terribly rushed and you may go in with a sore throat but actually you also might have other things to tell them too but once the first thing is addressed you do somehow feel that’s it, your time’s over, go now, whereas when you’re seeing someone and let’s be honest about it when you’re paying them for their time you feel a lot more empowered to say well okay I’ve got a sore throat but also this is going on for me and that is going on for me and can you treat me for the whole lot please. And that’s what you get.

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