The idea that I don’t think of myself as an alternative therapist may seem curious to some of you, but it’s a label I’ve always rejected and a label I believe that does serious harm to the ability of the public to get good healthcare.

‘Alternative’ therapy – or alternative medicine, or complimentary medicine – is so called because it represents an alternative to conventional medicine. Typically, it presents itself as an alternative in a number of ways:

1. As being natural, where conventional medicine is unnatural or artificial.

2. As being traditional, where conventional medicine is new and recent.

3. As being holistic, meaning that it treats the whole person, where conventional medicine is presented as targeting symptoms.

Actually, in my mind, there is a fourth, less widely publicised difference between alternative medicine and conventional medicine:

4. Being based on faith, assumption or anecdotal evidence, where conventional medicine is (mostly) based on scientific evidence.

Why does this matter?

Well, at the end of the day, all of us want the treatments we choose to work. If we are plagued with chronic pain, feelings of depression, a broken arm or even just a common cold, we want a remedy that will actually solve those problems.

It may seem obvious to point out, but the first three differences are actually no guarantee that a treatment will be useful to us. Just because a particular treatment has been used for thousands of years, is completely natural and addresses the person’s whole life rather than just their symptoms doesn’t mean it is guaranteed to work. The only way to know whether it works is to test it – simple as that.

I recognise that this may appear self-evident, but its amazing to me how many people continue to assume that something will be good for them just because it is ‘natural’. I should point out that Amanita Phalloides, the European Death Cap mushroom is both completely natural and fatally poisonous if eaten.

Thus, to my mind, to label treatments as conventional or alternative is misleading, because these terms have nothing to do with their most pertinent attribute – their efficacy. We need to know purely and simply whether treatments are effective or ineffective. You may be tempted to conclude that I am a simple CAM-basher, believing that conventional = good, alternative = bad. This is not so. My concern is in fact that the whole ‘conventional vs alternative’ debate draws attention away from which treatments work and which treatments don’t.

In fact, as I see it, there are effective and ineffective treatments available under both headings, and this creates a number of pernicious problems.

Firstly, you have the problem that many alternative therapies and medicines are presented as being effective without any rigorous checking of whether this is actually true. What constitutes ‘rigorous checking’ is enough for a book of its own, never mind a blog post, but thankfully, a pretty good one already exists and you can read it at The James Lind Library.

Secondly, you have the problem that treatments and therapies that do actually rigorously check their efficacy are dismissed on the basis of their historical ‘alternative’ associations. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that hypnosis is one of those. But that’s what irks me – most therapies and therapists labelled as ‘alternative’ have little or no hard evidence for their efficacy and are quite rightly dismissed by the established healthcare system. Hypnosis, however, has a wide variety of good quality evidence. In fact, it can actually do something as useful and valuable as making lumbar punctures less painful for child cancer patients. But it doesn’t get the recognition or the use that the evidence deserves because it is lumped in with a lot of ‘alternative’ treatments that are generally unproven and untested.

Thirdly, however, you have the grisly problem of the belief that medication is the solution to everything. In many ways, the problem with this attitude is beautifully elucidated by Violent Acres. Feelings of depression, anxiety and misery are not just problems of brain chemistry. They can be indicators that a person’s life isn’t meeting their basic needs. The solutions to that problem are both personal and social.

As an example, consider how happy you would be if the circumstances of your life caused you to regularly question whether you had value as a human being. Now consider many of the messages that advertising sends to people about their value, or the messages that the fashion industry sends to women about theirs. These problems are not going to be solved by drugs – they’re going to be solved by organising society in a way that better recognises the intrinsically equal worth and value of human life.

This, of course, is not a new idea. A bunch of guys were kicking it around nearly three hundred years ago now. You know, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…’, all that good stuff.

So, please, let’s not talk about ‘conventional’ and ‘alternative’. Let’s get on with talking about ‘effective’ and ‘ineffective’, and then making the most effective treatments we can find available to the largest number of people as quickly as possible.