For every high-profile health guru, there is a small army of complementary practitioners working quietly behind the scenes to consolidate the educational and regulatory infrastructure of alternative healthcare. The naturopath, osteopath and acupuncturist Joseph Goodman, who has died aged 77, was one such practitioner.
In addition to caring for his patients for nearly 40 years, Joe worked tirelessly to improve educational standards in his chosen disciplines. At a time of great change, maturation and increasing acceptance for these medical systems, he was instrumental in helping to ensure that practitioners were well regulated but, equally importantly, fairly represented.
In the late 1970s, when the West Midlands bill was passing through parliament, it contained a clause that threatened to subject acupuncturists to the same licensing restrictions as massage parlours and tattooists. Joe was one of a small group of practitioners who succeeded in persuading the House of Lords to grant exemption to members of the British Acupuncture Association. He was also a member of the first medical delegation to be invited to visit Chinese traditional medicine colleges and hospitals after the country opened its borders in 1975. As his profile rose, he was frequently called upon to present the natural medicine perspective on radio and television.
When the acupuncture profession was threatened by divisions between old and new practitioners in the late 1970s, he recognised that a unified register would have greater control over codes of practice and could raise standards from within, ensuring better safeguards for the public. Joe became chairman of the Council for Acupuncture, a forum for the different groups within the profession. This led to the creation in 1995 of the British Acupunc ture Council, which now registers and regulates the majority of UK acupuncturists. He was its first president, and served until 2000.
He applied the same principles of leadership when he became dean of the College of Osteopaths in 1977. Joe helped to steer their extended pathway training to degree course level, giving graduates accreditation with the newly created statutory body, the General Osteopathic Council, which opened its register in 1998.
Joe was born in Johannesburg to a Lithuanian father and English mother. He trained as an air-conditioning engineer, but his enthusiasm cooled, and he turned instead to the theatrical work for which he had displayed a talent in his school days. He made his professional debut in repertory at the Standard Theatre, often appearing in plays that challenged the apartheid regime, and earning accolades from the Johannesburg Times.
In 1951 he moved to England, where he met his first wife Kathleen and became involved with leading innovators in experimental theatre, including Joan Littlewood and Charles Marowitz, and with some of the early theatre-in-education projects run by Brian Way's Theatre Centre.
It was while working in theatre that Joe started to develop recurrent throat problems. After he was successfully treated by a naturopath, he became convinced of the importance of teaching people to take responsibility for their own health using natural treatments and healthy nutrition. This inspired him to study at the British College of Naturopathy and Osteopathy, from which he graduated in 1965. He joined the practice of the renowned medical herbalist, Geoffrey Whitehouse who specialised in women's ailments, an area Joe also embraced, and he later established his own London practices in Park Street, Mayfair, and Hendon.
Joe studied acupuncture at the then embryonic British College of Acupuncture and also served on the committee of the Research Society for Natural Therapeutics, which mounted the first formal postgraduate training courses in cranial osteopathy in the late 1960s.
He was, first and foremost, a naturopath, and believed strongly that the discipline's principles underpinned all complementary and alternative medicine. (This April he completed a three-year term as president of the British Naturopathic Association.) Though active in the initiatives that led to the creation of the Prince of Wales Foundation for Integrated Health, he was a strong advocate of the autonomy of the natural medicine professions. He carried these precepts into his personal life, believing that healing work imposed a moral imperative to respect all other creatures. A vegetarian (later a vegan), he supported many humanitarian causes and peace initiatives.
Kathleen died in 1988 and, in 1990, Joe married a fellow naturopath and osteopath, Linda, who survives him, as do Sharon and Janine, the daughters of his first marriage, and his step-daughter Jasmine.
· Joseph Goodman, naturopath, osteopath and acupuncturist, born January 6 1926; died October 1 2003
