MANY practitioners of alternative and complementary medicines are charlatans, according to Dr Garrett Hayes, editor of Forum, published by the Irish College of General Practitioners.
"They have no qualms at all about making definitive and totally unsustainable statements about a client's state of health and with no objective evidence to support their position," he writes in the current issue.
"They happily provide treatments and therapies with no scientific basis or foundation."
Dr Hayes was especially scathing about alternative practitioners' diagnoses of the causes of back pain.
"Why is it that when we see a patient with low back pain, whose X-rays show no abnormality when even CT or MRI scans are clear, an alternative practitioner will discover that there are intervertebral discs out of place and that the pelvis is tilted? A tilted or out-of-place pelvis is de rigueur!
"Why do patients, whom we previously assumed to be reasonably intelligent and logical, fall for such an absurd explanation?
"Why does a 30-minute examination costing between £15 and £20 have so much credibility? Are we in fact victims of our own making?"
Medical doctors, having got rid of their old, patronising attitudes, were now willing to admit to patients that they do not know what is wrong with them.
Alternative practitioners, according to Dr Hayes, admit to no such doubts and this may have given them an advantage over medical doctors.
"They always know what is wrong and what the answer should be. They can diagnose renal and hepatic disease, they can discover allergies and all of these conditions could not be diagnosed by conventional medicine."
Doctors, he said, "need to expose the charlatan claims made by many alternative practitioners, which ultimately do little to help our clients."