GREEN APPROACH TO COMPLEMENTARY MEDICINE

In the run-up to the recent general election, I read an interesting interview with Dr Jillian Creasy, the Health & Social Care Spokesperson for the Green Party.

The Green Party’s 2015 election manifesto called for “complementary medicines that are cost effective and have been shown to work to be made available on the NHS”. As part of their model for the health service, they called for wider adoption of complementary medicine systems, including acupuncture, which have been shown in clinical trials to work and to be cost-effective and the rejection of those treatments which are not demonstrably beneficial or cost-effective.

Some sections of the media and online community have misrepresented this stance and falsely linked their policy with areas of complementary medicine that do not have a good evidence base, which is basically the opposite of what they are advocating.

The Green Party also seem interested in a broader approach to healthcare, involving diet, exercise, and lifestyle. They would ideally like to see a shift away from the increasingly market-led system which means that healthcare that doesn’t deliver a profit for the pharmaceutical or medical technology industries is under-funded and under-developed. They point to massive amounts of evidence on how diet and lifestyle can help to prevent and alleviate a wide range of conditions and would like to see the NHS advocating this to promote a broader sense of healthcare in our society.