What we know today as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has roots going back 5,000 years to Chinese (traditional Chinese medicine), Indian (Ayurvedic medicine) and similar healing traditions in cultures across the planet. For thousands of years, these diverse medical traditions had in common a belief in the energy of the body and the need for harmony between mind, body and spirit. The role of the 'doctor' was to facilitate the healing process by identifying and removing obstacles to health. Therapies addressed the underlying cause of the disease by encouraging lifestyle changes, self-care and preventive strategies, rather than simply suppressing symptoms.

If this all sounds rather familiar, that's probably due to an extraordinary full circle that has taken place over the last century. Throughout most of the 19th century, good doctors used the same skills as today's herbalists, osteopaths and dieticians; they were generous with time and empathy, and relied on a good bed-side manner. Prayer was important, as was "a change of air"; more dubiously, so were lots of laxatives and bleeding and leeches. Right up until the early 20th century, sick people relied on much the same kind of therapies as their ancestors.

The last century, however, particularly the decades following the Second World War, brought significant change. As GP and journalist, James Lefanu noted in his book The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, from the 1950s, a series of medical breakthroughs seemed to prove beyond doubt that previous attempts at healing were nothing more than mere quackery. These triumphs included: the discovery of penicillin, leading to today's antibiotics; cortisone (a powerful anti-inflammatory medicine); streptomycin (a powerful antibiotic that beats tuberculosis); insulin (to treat diabetes) and chlorpromazine (an anti-psychotic which controls schizophrenia). There were also huge strides forward beyond the pharmaceutical industry. Open heart surgery, hip replacements, kidney transplants, intensive care and successful vaccination programmes both saved and improved the quality of countless millions of lives.

It's no surprise that so much power to alter human destiny would lead, as Lefanu suggests, "to the resultant abandonment of homely remedies such as massage, manipulation and dietary advice, only for them to be taken up by alternative practitioners". And this was exactly what happened - with a dramatic explosion in the growth of 'alternative' therapies throughout the second half of the 20^th century. Alongside modern medicine, CAM began to develop as an entirely separate discipline - contemptuous of the achievements of mainstream medicine, while at the same time being dismissed by mainstream practictioners as at best ineffective, and at worst fraudulent. For most people, getting the best from mainstream and alternative medicine was a delicate operation: those who did try to use both services learnt that in order to avoid criticism, the best strategy was to keep quiet about the use of the alternative therapies.

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."

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Content last updated: 09/09/2004

About our expert

This article was written for Open2.net by Jane Feinmann. Jane is a freelance health writer working for national newspapers and magazines. She's previously been health editor at two women's magazines: Family Circle and Best. Before that, Jane was features editor at GP newspaper and Pulse.

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