Madam, - If, as Dr Brian Hughes claims (Head-to-Head, March 12th) complementary and alternative medicine treatments are inert, perhaps he could explain why the drug companies worked so hard to get St John's wort banned in Ireland.
If such treatments are inert, perhaps he could explain why roughly 32 per cent of the prescriptions in Europe and nearly 40 per cent in France are for alternative medicines that actually help hundreds of thousands of people to get totally better - and without the risk of the dreadful side-effects of most establishment drugs.
Perhaps he might also explain why, if establishment treatments do work, they are now acknowledged as the fourth-largest cause of death in the United States, (after cancer, heart disease and strokes).
Ruth Cloherty (the other "head") refers politely in her article to the gaps in the health service.
However, we don't have anything remotely like a health service - merely a broken-down illness service. - Yours, etc,
DICK BARTON,
(Consultant in nutritional medicine),
Kevin Street,
Tinahely,
Co Wicklow.
Madam, - I understand Irene Stevenson's questioning (March 14th) of whether Dr Brian Hughes has ever used alternative medicine; it's a common query to people who question the effectiveness of such interventions. However, I think it misses one of the main points of his article.
The fact is that just about any "treatment" you could make up, if administered with sincerity and care, will have some impact - usually on pain, inflammation, mood etc - and for very interesting psychological and physiological reasons related to what is called the placebo effect.
Despite repeated vocal protests to the contrary, alternative medicine has consistently failed to demonstrate that it has any effects on people's health and mood above and beyond these very real but limited placebo outcomes. This is important for many reasons. In particular it accounts for people believing that alternative treatments "work". It also suggests that, in the absence of alternative medicine showing effects greater than placebo, we should be very slow to accept their treatments and the strange theories of health which underpin their treatments. - Yours, etc,
MIKE REEN
Shanaway Road,
Ennis.