No 

Integrated medicine takes time.  Because of its more holistic nature, patients require a longer consultation and treatments are usually longer too, which is costly.  If integrated services are to be provided in a governanced way, to protect the patient, they need to be available in a properly regulated environment.  Unfortunately, all this does take time and finance and currently the NHS is very short of resources. The NHS will therefore have a tendency to authorise spending on Class A medical evidence which usually excludes integrated medicine.

Training in the more accepted forms of alternative therapy, such as acupuncture, is now very professionally organised. I give acupuncture as an example as I know more about this than other integrated therapies. It is taught on the basis of Western neuro-anatomy to doctors, dentists and physiotherapists by the British Medical Acupuncture Society, at postgraduate level. Teaching of integrated therapies needs to be introduced into the undergraduate medical school curriculum. This requires overcoming some of the prejudice that exists in attitudes towards integrated medicine and needs investment by universities to work with organisations such as the British Medical Acupuncture Society. Until doctors and nurses are trained at undergraduate level to achieve a working knowledge of different health management options, it will be extremely difficult to make a thorough provision for integrated health in the NHS.

Integrated health requires the healthcare professional to have a working knowledge  of many therapies including acupuncture, osteopathy, herbalism, homeopathy, massage therapy, aromatherapy, reiki, hypnotherapy, NLP and Ayurvedic medicine as well as orthodox medicine.   The cost of training and employing a top calibre integrated therapist is likely therefore to be very high. When combined with perceived low efficacy is not something that the NHS will fund.

Unfortunately, it is not in the interest of drug companies to provide funding for research into alternative therapies because there’s little chance of them making a profit.  However, until the orthodox medical world see proper cost benefit analysis in the form of class A medical evidence, they are extremely unlikely to provide integrated health within an NHS setting. 

Many people within integrated health who would like to see alternative ways of assessing effectiveness other than the rather limiting methodology of Class A medical evidence in subjects which are very disparate and where there are many confounding factors.  However NICE guidelines have started to accept the medical evidence for acupuncture in various conditions such as migraine and backache etc.  If this trend continues, then the funding for these therapies may eventually follow the NICE guidelines.  Currently, funding is very difficult to achieve even with modern day commissioning.

In our private practice we have been pioneers of integrated health and have managed to combine orthodox medicine with acupuncture, hypnotherapy, nutrition, aromatherapy, massage, reflexology, CBT, osteopathy, and the use of psychology as opposed to psychiatry.

We are being creative and finding new solutions for treatment and utilising drug therapy where appropriate.

The NHS is a marvellous institution and provides extremely high levels of care in the majority of cases.  But as modern medicine continues to march apace, it will be very difficult to back integrated medicine when there is so much demand to fund new evidence-based treatments such as the new cervical cancer vaccine, to name only one recent excellent but expensive medical innovation. 

It is therefore my strong feeling that it would be extremely difficult to afford the provision of this form of treatment within the NHS.