Lso-called alternative, soft, parallel medicines are once again the target of criticism in the media. The most recent reason: the appearance in Doctolib of practitioners who practice in the field of health but are not health professionals. These professionals, whose number seems to have increased sharply since the Covid-19 pandemic, have in common a training in the field of health that is difficult to read, sometimes non-existent and generally not validated by bodies approved by the State.
It is imperative to warn patients about the risks of the expansion of quack, parallel or alternative health practices that place themselves outside of conventional care and in opposition to it. It is necessary to denounce the scams to which some patients may fall victim when they fall into the hands of ill-intentioned “healers”, to deplore the sometimes serious accidents resulting from inappropriate care or diagnostic delays for which the lack of training and clinical skills is responsible. of these practitioners.
It is obviously inadmissible to substitute “alternative” approaches for conventional therapeutic approaches. Our discussion here concerns exclusively the complementary practices integrated into conventional medicine, from a care perspective.
Get out of our French impasse
Whistleblowers on the subject are therefore necessary, but can we stop at a denunciation? The observation is that the health authorities have not taken up the issue and are allowing abuses to take hold, despite the Interministerial Mission for vigilance and the fight against sectarian abuses. Wouldn’t it be time to build, with the supervisory authorities, a reasoned place for complementary practices in the healthcare system, to ensure their safety through adequate training and regulation?
This is the choice that some of our European neighbors have made, in Germany for almost a hundred years, in Switzerland for less than ten years. Their example could be a source of inspiration to get out of our French impasse consisting of a caricatural contradiction that denounces while letting things go.
In Germany, health practitioners (or naturopath) have a diploma in the Land where they practice. Their training, which can last from one to three years, focuses on the basics of medicine and the main diseases. It leads these practitioners to know how to identify medical emergencies and clinical situations that require the use of a doctor: in other words, to “first do no harm” (” First, do no harm “).
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