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As people grow increasingly frustrated by the NHS, many are turning to alternative medicines. But at what cost?
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Danielle Carr-Gomm was a Type 1 diabetic and needed daily insulin injections. But she was scared of needles, so sought other therapies. By 2016, the 77-year-old began attending paida lajin workshops led by Hongchi Xiao, an alternative healer who promoted “slap therapy” as a method for diabetics to expel toxins.
He’d led her to believe that his therapy worked, and on her first day at a Wiltshire workshop, Carr-Gomm told Xiao that she’d stopped taking insulin. He congratulated her, and days later, she died of diabetic ketoacidosis. In August 2024, Xiao was found guilty of manslaughter and he is due to be sentenced later this year.
Carr-Gomm wasn’t an outlier in seeking alternative therapies, it’s a trend that’s growing as public dissatisfaction with the NHS pushes patients to seek alternatives.
The complementary and alternative medicine market is predicted to be worth $437.9 billion by 2031, driven by influencers, wellness coaches and various unregulated practitioners.
As NHS services struggle to meet demand – with 61 per cent of people unsure if they could conveniently book a GP appointment – more people are turning to alternative medicine. Practitioner-led complementary and alternative medicine use rose from 12 per cent of the population in 2005 to 16 per cent in 2015.
And as Carr-Gomm’s death proves, putting faith in strangers can have tragic consequences.
Prof Chris French is the head of the anomalistic psychology research unit at Goldsmith’s, University of London, as well as a chartered member of the British Psychological Society. He explains that certain people may be more susceptible to alternative therapies.
He says: “There are the sort of people like myself, who like to think we’re very rational and logical about everything. And there are other people who quite definitely rely much more on feelings and reject that.”
Prof French acknowledges that mainstream healthcare’s flaws can push people away. “Often the alternative practitioner will spend much more time with each patient – whereas an NHS GP will give you 10 minutes, if you can get an appointment. Every little complaint will be taken seriously, and they’ll be listened to sympathetically. And that is partly what people want from these situations,” he says.
“I don’t think conventional medicine has got all the answers and that it’s perfect, or that Big Pharma is the answer to all of our problems. But there’s much better evidence for conventional treatments, than there is for any of this complementary and alternative stuff.”
Prof French supposes that most individuals selling wellness – beyond mainstream high street shops working for mass profit – is intended well.
He says: “I think most of the people who kind of sell these kinds of products probably genuinely do believe in them. And then obviously there are the occasional people who are just deliberately exploiting the weak and the sick. I think that particularly tends to happen with respect to things like faith healing.
Edzard Ernst, a professor emeritus at the University of Exeter, tells The Telegraph that “the current failures of the NHS” are one reason for alternative healthcare’s draw. He also lays blame with “many claims made by alternative practitioners” – his most recent book, Bizarre Medical Ideas, debunks falsehoods spun by specific forms of alternative medicine.
It’s important work: patients seeking alternative healthcare can expect all sorts of risks including spending beyond their means, becoming more unwell beyond the point of effective medical treatment, interrupting the process of their medical treatment, becoming sicker and, potentially, death.
Francesca*, 30, felt let down by the NHS when, at 24, she was on “the trip of my life” and contracted dengue fever. A Singaporean pharmacist prescribed the antihistamine cinnarizine. It made her feel “momentarily better”, but she sought NHS help on returning to the UK for symptoms including “nausea, severe fatigue, headaches and a weird chest tightness”. Doctors diagnosed her with post viral fatigue syndrome “and gave me no treatment, I was left alone”.
She ended up seeking help via a nutritionist online to help with her “post viral fatigue”. She paid £300 for an initial consultation. She described symptoms of “debilitating, profound fatigue, migraines and brain fog” and was recommended to “go on a gluten-free, dairy-free diet and do microbiome tests”.
Before administering the tests, the nutritionist instructed Francesca to take 10 supplements a day. These included, she sighs, “vitamin C flush, protein powder, vitamin A drops, adaptocrine K2 [including ginseng, holy basil and ashwagandha] a multivitamin [including bovine colostrum, green tea, inositol, pomegranate tree, shiitake, zinc, astragalus and selenium], liver GI, B vitamins, quercetin”.
Over four months, Francesca spent £2,500 on this treatment, and after reporting little improvement to the nutritionist, she was simply prescribed more supplements. She drew a line: “It was just becoming too expensive, and I wasn’t seeing any major improvement.”
Luckily, Francesca recovered after an NHS doctor prescribed her cinnarizine, to be taken until she reached full recovery. Within weeks she did. She now says “there should definitely be more regulation of this sort of advice”.
Lisa Perry, 33, had a bad neck in 2022. She says: “I had been sleeping on lots of pillows, because I had been suffering with acid reflux.” The NHS had offered her an antacid that she refused as it blocks B12 absorption. After becoming dizzy, NHS nurses told her, she says “Oh, it’s probably nothing, you’re just anxious.” She was discharged without any further treatment, which led her to making an appointment with a well-reviewed osteopath that she’d found online.
Lisa was expecting the osteopath to “maybe just stick a few needles in my neck and give it a rub”. However, she says, he suggested “adjustments”, which the London School of Osteopathy describes as “high velocity thrust techniques to adjust joints of the body”.
“I felt put on the spot, but I went along with it because I just wanted some relief. I immediately felt really dizzy. He said ‘that will go’ and advised I used ice and heat on my neck.” But, after a week, Lisa reported no signs of improvement, and the osteopath returned. “He did some dry needling [inserting acupuncture needles into muscles] and said sorry, but it didn’t get better.”
Now, Lisa says she suffers with “numbness around my whole head and my left side has gone weak. I can’t leave the house and I can’t lie down and I feel, constantly, so dizzy, like I’ve drunk a bottle of wine.” She is awaiting an MRI on the NHS to see whether or not it confirms her suspicions that the osteopath damaged her spinal cord.
She blames the osteopath for delaying her treatment: “He made my initial pain 10 times worse, and I’ve basically been bedridden since. I’ve been out of work since last year and now I’m on Universal Credit. This practitioner shouldn’t be touching anyone. I want to report him to his board, but they’re going to want proof that I don’t have.”
Robert*, who is 21, lives with ME, a type of chronic fatigue, and says outdated views from the NHS pushed him towards bad science: “Their whole premise is that ME is psychological in nature.” He cites Nice guidance in 2007 – now updated – recommending that ME sufferers undergo graded exercise therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). He was a fit and active pupil, “playing rugby and French horn, singing in a choir”, until he contracted a virus aged 14.
An NHS doctor recommended “graded activity management”, including a programme run by a practitioner whose qualifications include clinical hypnotherapy, neurolinguistic programming and psychological kinesiology.
Robert’s recommended treatment for ME amounted to a £2000 group session of “six full on days in a boiling hot room, where the therapist explained that our brain is in a loop, and we think we’re tired”.
He recalls tasks where he was encouraged to remember a place that he had felt calm in “and then he made you step to the right and try to imagine, or make yourself believe, that you will become better, and therefore you will”.
There was also a “very embarrassing” task where “he got us to stand up on one side of the room, in front of everyone else and shout ‘no’ at the top of your lungs and put your hands out in front of you”. It did not work to improve Robert’s ME symptoms. He describes the course as “cult-like with a lot of patient-blaming, like ‘If you’re not doing it hard enough, you’re not going to get better’”.
Robert explains that the workshop exhausted him at a point where his illness hadn’t fully set in. He says: “These programmes fundamentally take away your freedom to do the things that make you happy, or to seek treatments that actually work. They have a real, fundamental harm.” He continues to seek ways of improving his condition, and learning more about it.
Many will report a feeling of calm after a massage, a pep in their step after chewing multivitamins, or even a sense of inner balance after adorning their nightstand with crystals. Could this placebo effect be worth it?
Prof Ernst says the placebo effect is best delivered as part of medically proven procedures and treatments. He says: “It comes as a free bonus with any well-administered therapy. We don’t need quackery to benefit from it.”
Prof French says the same, suggesting that the natural variation of illness – some days you feel sicker than others – is often misattributed as a lifting of symptoms after an alternative medicine is taken. “Because of that natural variability, there’s a pretty good chance that they may well feel a little bit better, relatively shortly after taking that form of alternative therapy, and then they’re likely to fall into the old kind of post hoc ergo propter hoc, as the phrase goes, ‘after this therefore, because of this’.”
This potentially stops people getting the treatment that they need: “The big dangers are that people might rely on alternative medicine for something that was potentially treatable until it gets to a point where it’s too late,” says Prof French.
As for those who insist that a particular therapy works for them, Prof Ersnt is steadfast and says that feeling great after alternative therapy may be down to “many reasons that are unrelated to the treatment in question. Apart from the placebo effect, for example, we can never tell whether the condition would not also have improved without any therapy at all. In fact, we might even postulate that it would have improved quicker, if they had not used the treatment in question.”
Some might enjoy the softer benefits of alternative therapies, but according to an Australian review published in 2015, homoeopathy (a type of complementary or alternative medicine) is not effective for any health condition. Its researchers concluded: “People who choose homoeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence.”
Unfortunately, although the MHRA’s Yellow Card scheme allows for people to report side effects of homoeopathic products, there is very little regulation of what one human can do to another under the guise of assisting their health. Ernst recommends that anyone seeking alternative therapies do their research and then go by the old adage: “If it sounds too good to be true, it most probably is.”
*All names of case studies quoted have been changed
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