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Surging popular interest has been driving mainstream medicine towards a working relationship with traditional therapies over the last decade. Peter Goldie looks at how Monash University's Faculty of Medicine is involved in a global move to integrate old and new science. Whether it likes it or not, Western science-based medicine is being forced to confront the widespread arrival of alternative therapies. There is much to address. Called variously traditional, alternative, natural, supportive, complementary or, as put recently by the Australian Medical Council, 'unorthodox', a wide variety of therapies has sprung from a range of geographies, cultures and civilisations. However, with the alternative medicine sector in Australia turning over an estimated $1 billion in 1997 and rising rapidly, there is little doubt that both patient and general practitioner acceptance of alternative therapies is rising rapidly.
Courses integrated A number of courses run by the institute and other approved organisations have been integrated into the mainstream medical course through a series of options available to medical students, including acupuncture, meditation, food and nutrition, the philosophy and science of well-being, and even humour. "There needs to be more integration between the Western medical community and the natural medical community."
"Doctors acknowledge that this stuff works and I think there needs to be more integration between the Western medical community and the natural medical community," he says. "At the moment, there really isn't; there are two camps, and the patient is caught in the middle, going between one and the other." Dr Cohen can claim expertise in perceptions from both the traditional doctor's perspective and that of the alternative therapist. He co-authored a paper recently published in the Medical Journal of Australia that revealed surprisingly high acceptance rates of complementary therapies among GPs in Victoria. The study found that 20 per cent of GPs had practised acupuncture, meditation or hypnosis and that a further 80 per cent had referred patients to practitioners of these therapies. A quarter to one-third were interested in training in chiropractic, herbal medicine, naturopathy, and vitamin and mineral therapy. Dr Cohen is also writing a text book for natural therapists on how to deal with doctors. "It covers professional and ethical issues, but also medical diagnosis in the context of which illnesses therapists should recognise and the need to call in a doctor or ambulance if they see them." The reported increasing interest among GPs in the area of natural therapies is reflected among students doing medicine at Monash. Ms Samantha D'Cruze, president of the Monash University Medical Undergraduate Society, has taken two of the complementary medicine options available in her course. "I did courses on the philosophy and science of well-being and homeopathy. I found that it opens your mind to the use of other things when conventional therapies may not be working," Ms D'Cruze said. She says that while some complementary therapies such as acupuncture are not well understood, their benefits can be clearly evident. However, the benefits of other therapies such as homeopathy and aromatherapy are less clearly understood or apparent. "There is not enough evidence to say that such therapies work," she says, "but there are people out there who believe they do, and for this reason I think we should make the opportunity available to them." The dean of Medicine, Professor Nick Saunders, says the faculty's involvement in complementary medicine is in line with a recent review of guidelines by the Australian Medical Council. In part the review states: "Much of the rhetoric of 'holistic' and 'integrative' unorthodox medicine, which claims to consider the patient as a whole individual in a social context and not just as the bearer of symptoms and signs, is entirely compatible with orthodox medicine."
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