Natural Medicine [antikvár]

IntroductionWhen, twenty years ago, the late Geoflfrey Murray undertook to survey unorthodox medical practices in Britain for the Spectator they were so little known that they had not acquired a collective name. With the Edinburgh Festival in mind he and I settled for 'Fringe Medicine', a term which was promptly adopted by the British Medical Journal.While expressing scepticism about most of the therapies described, the BMJ editorial admitted 'we may have something to learn from the others'; and the intervening two decades have shown this to be an understatement. In some instances the change of status has been dramatic: notably in the case of acupuncture. So little notice had acupuncture attracted by 1959 that Murray did not even mention it. When, four years later, I wrote Fringe Medicine (he and I had been commissioned to produce the book together, but his job had taken him out of the country) I was advised even by people sympathetic to unorthodox therapies to leave acupuncture out, because it was so demonstrably bogus. But now . . .Unorthodox forms of diagnosis and treatment today enjoy public confidence of a kind that then seemed hardly conceivable. Partly this is the consequence of growing dissatisfaction with orthodox medicine. Modern drugs, it has come to be realized, are not the answer to most of the diseases of civilisation - cancer, heart disorders, arthritis, allergies and the rest. The cost of orthodox treatment, too, has been mounting until in the United States it has become a source of alarm to the Federal Government, and to citizens compelled to set aside an ever-increasing proportion of their incomes for insurance. And although the cost has been kept under better control in Britain, the once admired National Health Service shows many signs of decay. 'Cash problems aside,' as an editorial in World Medicine observed on the occasion of the service's thirtieth anniversary, 'the NHS is8