ABSTRACT
I know the answer to this question and it is walnuts, but you will have to read the rest of these musings to find out why. There was a motion put forward to a recent RCGP council meeting to the effect that the College should take more cognisance of complementary medicine with the implica tion that some standard setting would not go amiss. In the subsequent debate there were warnings of fearsome and little-known interactions between Granny's Ginkgo and her warfarin, of the risk of paraplegia from having one's neck cricked by a manipulator of some tribe or other, and an overwhelming feeling of incipient quackery mixed with annoying pseudo science, especially annoying because at least half of our patients use some form of alternative medicine, usually without telling us. How can they be so gullible! There was then a contribution pointing out the dangers of modern medicine, citing the recent CoX2 debacle, where at least two mainstream flashy new arthritic wonder drugs have killed more people in a couple of years than Ginkgo biloba has done in its entire usage, pointing out that the evidence base for physiotherapy is no better than for osteopathy and probably worse than for chiropractic and that many common surgical procedures have a wafer-thin evidence base. Others tried to produce a hierarchy with acupuncture and chiropractic at the top and reflexology at the bottom, but this attempted ordering of the essentially random seemed doomed to failure. Council squared the circle by appointing a working party and hurriedly moving on, but all of us are firmly caught up in this debate, which is in essence about the nature of healing.
