Response to Dr Young’s letter

Dear Editor,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond to Dr Young’s letter. The points he makes are well taken, and I largely agree with him.

The nub of the issue for me is the extent to which complementary medicine ‘adopts the language of conventional medicine’. If complementary practitioners insist on adopting our scientific, reductionist paradigm, then they must, as Dr Young says, be prepared to be judged by the methods and standards adopted by that model. My argument is that it is inappropriate for complementary medicine to adopt the same paradigm as traditional medicine.

I would like to take issue with one point in Dr Young’s helpful letter. We should, as he says, be honest about what we expect to achieve and look for suitable end-points to measure, so that we can assess the true value of aspects of health care such as caring. However, I do not agree that this means ‘softer endpoints more akin to sociological research’ – not only should we not dismiss sociological research as ‘soft’, but additionally I think we can and should be able to measure these effects with conventional quantitative methods.