Complementary Medicine hasn't even achieved relegation status, because it hasn't yet officially joined the healthcare system league. While healthcare priorities entail high-tech, high-cost procedures geared especially toward younger people, complementary medicine, not having gone away after being spat at for several decades, is now being kept busy, chasing its tail, by the medical establishment, and will probably be spending the next 5–10 years defining standards, and determining who will be the kingpins within each therapy.

It has become an accepted fact that the causes of many cancers and other diseases are determined to a significant extent by environmental and dietary factors, including smoking, drinking, exposure to carcinogenic and mutagenic chemicals and materials. Research and clinical evidence over the past fifty years have provided us with an abundance of proof, particularly regarding environmental causes of diseases: smoking – lung cancer and heart disease; asbestos – lung cancer; nuclear radiation – leukaemia; alcohol – liver cirrhosis; smog and environmental pollution – asthma.