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Exactly when all this started to change is open to debate. A turning point seems to have been December 14, 1982 when Prince Charles, recently installed as President of the British Medical Association, was guest speaker at its 150th anniversary dinner. A long-term user of homeopathy and increasingly excited by complementary therapies, Prince Charles was characteristically blunt in putting forward his case to a medical profession which, two years previously, had (in a British Medical Journal editorial), dismissed CAM as "a flight from science".
Prince Charles demanded that doctors end their "hostility to the unorthodox" and accept that there were alternatives to "the objective, statistical, computerised approach to healing the sick". While fully recognising "the enormous benefits brought by modern medical science", Prince Charles said he was concerned at the "frightening" dependency on drugs, which were costing the National Health Service (in 1982) £2 billion a year. "By concentrating on smaller and smaller fragments of the body, modern medicine perhaps loses sight of the patient as a whole human being, and by reducing health to mechanical functioning it is no longer able to deal with the phenomenon of healing," he said.
Six months later, Prince Charles made the same case when opening the new premises of the "alternative" Bristol Cancer Help Centre - commenting: "I think it is only right that a patient should be free to try a different form of treatment if he or she feels little progress is being made in, for instance, what could be referred to as a drug-based treatment."
It was an important point. For despite the massive success of modern mainstream medicine, significant under-performance has persisted into the 21st century - namely, its failure to have an impact on long-term chronic conditions. One in five people in the UK has tried at least one form of complementary therapy, with one in ten GPs actively involved in providing it. The health problems which are most likely to attract people to complementary therapies, according to a detailed study of complementary medicine use in the United States, published in May 2004 by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, are: back, neck, head, or joint aches, colds, anxiety or depression, gastrointestinal disorders or sleeping problems - almost all of which are conditions poorly managed by Western medicine.
The study also identified the type of person most likely to use CAM. She is a woman with a higher than average educational level who may have been hospitalised in the past year and has probably a higher than average commitment to keeping well: she is more likely to have given up smoking, for instance.
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