Complementary Medicine appears to be making significant progress - growing popularity with the public, increased albeit sometimes begrudging acceptance by the medical profession, a higher research profile and improving professionalism of practitioners of the various therapeutic disciplines.

Yet, treading the path of complementary medicine has always been and is still highly risky on many levels, because the effective practice of therapies which are generally not highly profit-making and sometimes not fully researched or understood, enables practitioners of complementary medicine to become the target of articulate and powerful critics. There have been and will doubtless continue to be harmful attacks in the media of virtually every therapy, and the continued threat is ever present to withdraw herbs, nutritional supplements, essential oils and even homoeopathic medicines, subject to bureaucratic, political or big business pressures.

A proposed strategy to avoid these undesirable scenarios is to continue to make the practice of complementary medicine as normal and as integral a therapeutic activity as ordinary medical practice - no whizz bang magic tricks, no magical cures for previously incurable diseases just helping people to get better using the gentle and non-toxic approaches of natural medicines. Practitioners and clinicians working in their practices, alongside and in partnership with GPs; researchers continuing to publish the results of their clinical results in peer-reviewed and scholarly journals, satisfied people who have successfully got well from long-standing and debilitating conditions, having first tried standard orthodox treatments to no avail. For precisely just such a project, I refer readers to the Lewisham Evaluation Report of Complementary Therapy in the NHS, reviewed on page 32 of this issue.

In a market-driven and thrill-seeking society, these suggestions may appear boring - normal and ordinary complementary practitioners helping people get well. However, having suffered the slings of sensationalist hype too often, a golden period of peaceful consolidation may be just what the doctor ordered for complementary medicine.