'FRINGE MEDICINE Soft—Your remarkably comprehensive feature on Fringe Medicine quoted
me as saying that practi- tioners of herbal medicine are 'irritated' that our Patients tend to be mainly the failures of the National Health Service.
May I say that our irritation is not because so Many of our cases are in an advanced 4tate of disease or physical degeneraty, for we are overjoyed at the frequency with which we are successful where orthodox medicine has failed. But we deplore a National Health Service which fails to make our therapy available in the early stages of disease when so much suffering could be avoided.
Financial considerations compel a patient to give orthodox medicine the first opportunity to heal, even where the evidence suggests that natural healing offers a more certain cure. This means that when, ultimately, the patient resorts to herbal medicine and/or osteopathy the case has become more difficult and costly.
We practitioners of herbal, naturopathic and osteopathic healing have no wish to become involved in the National Health Service as medical auxiliaries, subject to control by practitioners of therapies we cannot accept. We could not tolerate conditions which made it necessary to maintain such a large list of patients to whom we could not give adequate time for diagnosis and treatment of the whole person rather than the hasty suppression of his manifesting symptoms.
But we do feel that patients should not be com- pelled to pay for a Health Service which does not, or will not, supply the therapy of their choice and to Pay again for successful treatment after the Health Service doctor or hospital has failed.
This problem could very simply be solved by a payment-in-aid for approved treatments outside the National Health Service payable in the same way, if necessary, as National Health Sickness Benefit,— Yours faithfully,
F. NEWMAN TURNER °cornrow, Pasture Road, Letchworth
Previous page
