I once shared a cab with a young actress who had carried with her throughout the day a little velvet bag. It was handmade in purple crush, and looked like the sort of thing Quentin Crisp would have favoured had he had a colostomy. During the trip home, I asked her where she'd got it. She looked at me with dreamy incomprehension. "The bag?" she murmured. "The bag's nothing really. It's what's inside the bag that matters." Fighting the colostomy image, I decided to risk the supplementary question: "And what's in the bag?" "My crystal," she answered. And that, it was clear, was all she was going to say on the matter.
Devotees of complementary therapies are rarely so taciturn, which is understandable. If you've endured, to no avail, every treatment the medical establishment provides, only to find that when somebody presses your foot in an unusual way you feel all right again, it's natural to want to spread the word. But equally understandable is the suggestion from several leading doctors that GPs should refrain from promoting and funding unproven "remedies" when the NHS can barely afford to pay for proven ones .
Like many people, I find it hard to know where I stand on alternative therapies. On the one hand, I have the hypochondriac's awe of doctors, seeing them as higher beings with the ability to diagnose and cure a multitude of ills in the space of a two-minute consultation. Often, they begin writing a prescription before you've even finished telling them what the problem is, so great is their wisdom. Then I remember that all doctors started out as medical students, and wonder whether their treatment will have the same heaviness of touch and lack of originality as their comedy. The weight of scientific research is behind them, but that doesn't rule out human error.
We all have our "incompetent doctor" stories, like the doctor many years ago who prodded a relative's abdomen so vigorously that he caused his inflamed appendix to burst, and then sent him home saying he had a dicky tummy. After all, if doctors and conventional medicines were infallible, then nobody would be looking for an alternative. On the other hand, for all the anecdotal stuff in its favour, there is very little scientific proof in support of most complementary treatments.
It is a little surprising, therefore, that people who are reluctant to give their children antibiotics are quite willing to treat them with minuscule doses of arsenic. I know that in homeopathic remedies, such substances are massively diluted, but as someone who won't take a vitamin C tablet without reading the contra-indications leaflet, it would take a little more than hearsay and the self-confidence of a practitioner to get me to go down that route.
But that so many people feel better after trying alternative medicine seems a compelling reason for the NHS to go on providing it in a limited way, and with caveats attached. Placebo effect or not, people who believe their symptoms have diminished will go to the doctor less often and demand fewer drugs. That must be a good thing for NHS finances, and may free up some time for doctors to work on their stand-up routines.
Although there may be little definite proof of the efficacy of complementary therapies, the medical establishment should be mindful of my favourite science quotation, in which Isaac Asimov says that the phrase that heralds the most scientific discoveries is not "Eureka", but "That's funny".
I dined out on the actress with crystal anecdote for some months, the subtext being that my superior logic enabled me to see that a piece of rock in a little bag was unlikely to have a positive effect on anyone's life. But when she was nominated for an Oscar, I stopped laughing and went out and bought myself a velvet bag. Call it the placebo effect, but it certainly made me feel better. If only retail therapy were available on the NHS.
