As a doctor I sneered at alternative medicine for years. But after some startling results, I’ve done a U-turn: PROFESSOR ROB GALLOWAY

I used to think that modern medicine was the saviour for all ills, and I was dismissive of people who said they’d benefited from alternative remedies such as acupuncture.

I’d quietly snigger under my breath when a patient told me how yoga, rather than sertraline, was helpful for their stress. And sneer at those who took vitamins or supplements for this or that.

Not only was alternative medicine not my bag, I thought it was at best a waste of money — and almost certainly damaging. However, I can now announce a screeching U-turn.

Because for many patients, the approach that’s so indoctrinated into our medical psyche is clearly failing. We have patients with chronic pain dosed up on addictive (and often ineffective) opioid painkillers, for instance, and those with insomnia whose sleeping tablets have led to long-term dependency and ill health.

Let’s also not forget patients on multiple drugs for heart failure, blood pressure and high cholesterol, to combat the side-effects of unhealthy Western lifestyles filled with too much processed food and not enough exercise.

Although necessary, many of these medications have side-effects and can cause harm.

I treated a man a few months ago, following a fall, who was a perfect example of the downside of our current approach.

He was in his 80s and had dementia — and all the hallmarks of early Parkinson’s disease. He’d been suffering from back pain and insomnia, too, and been given the opioid painkiller codeine, as well as zopiclone to help him sleep.

He had high blood pressure and so was also on amlodipine, which lowers blood pressure but can make you dizzy if you stand up quickly.

At 3am he got up to go to the bathroom. The combination of his medications made his reflexes slower, and when he slipped on a rug, he failed to grab the handrail in time. He fell, breaking a few ribs, fracturing an arm and suffering significant bruising all over his face.

For someone healthy, these injuries would be easily manageable, possibly even without the need for admission to hospital. But for him, it made living alone at home very difficult. After a three-week hospital stay, he was discharged to a residential home and lost his independence. The blame lies with the side-effects of the medications he was taking.

Now, the modern medicine argument is that there was no alternative to these drugs, so we must accept the side-effects.

But over the past few years of my career, I’ve started to question this orthodoxy. A healthier lifestyle could certainly have led to my patient not needing his amlodipine, however, without his other medications, he would still have been in pain and sleeping badly. Or so I thought.

Last month, a study was published in the highly respected journal JAMA Network Open, which showed how effective acupuncture can be for helping patients with Parkinson’s to sleep. (Two in three patients suffer from insomnia.)

In the study, patients at the Guangzhou University Hospital in China were given either acupuncture or sham acupuncture (using needles that do not penetrate the skin).

After four weeks of treatment, those given real acupuncture had significantly better sleep.

The effect lasted for another four weeks after that. The quality of the trial was superb, and the statistical analysis showed that the risk of results being due to chance was less than one in 1,000 (with a drug, we consider it works if the results due to chance are less than one in 20).

Despite the remarkable results, it was published without fanfare — no drug company funding the publicity, you see.

The new findings echoed a trial of acupuncture on 72 patients with insomnia published in 2017 in the journal Sleep Medicine, which showed similar results.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know how it works. But does that matter?

Acupuncture has been performed in China for thousands of years, and results have now been replicated with the best form of scientific experiment — randomised controlled trials.

It doesn’t fit the medical model I was taught — and teach — but the only conclusion we can take is that the model I believed in is not fully correct.

Reading about these studies got me researching where else acupuncture could work.

There is evidence that it can be effective in treating gastro- intestinal pain, migraine and menopausal symptoms.

Crucially, it could also treat chronic pain, such as back pain, which I — like millions of others — suffer from, and for which there is little available in terms of effective treatments.

The first review of studies on acupuncture for back pain was published in 2005 in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal, and pooled the results of seven trials. This showed acupuncture was as effective as other treatments such as opioid medications, but without the side-effects.

But when I read the medical journals and undertook the continuous professional development that doctors must, it was the profit-making drug trials that were rammed down my throat — the findings of ‘no profit to be had’ acupuncture trials ignored.

But I’m so impressed by the results of these acupuncture studies that I have booked myself in later this week to see if it can help with my bad back.

It’s not just acupuncture. At a Royal College of Emergency Medicine conference this month a report on a type of traditional Chinese medication was presented as one of the top ten most influential papers published in the past year.

This raised eyebrows among the audience because the results were so unexpected.

Reported in JAMA, the study showed that the traditional Chinese drug tongxinluo — derived from plants and insects — taken after a heart attack, led to a 36 per cent reduction in outcomes such as stroke or death compared with a placebo.

Both the treatment and placebo group received the standard treatment as well, so we can only conclude that there was something in tongxinluo that had such a beneficial effect.

Again, just because we don’t understand how it worked, we cannot dismiss these findings.

Of course, we have to remember a herb is a herb until it is proven to have a medical benefit — and then it’s called a drug.

For example, digoxin and aspirin are lifesaving medications, but were originally derived from the foxglove plant and willow bark, respectively.

We need a UK-based randomised controlled trial to see whether the results of this Chinese treatment are replicated for the patients I treat.

Which brings me back to my U-turn: I believe in medicine — mainstream, and now alternative — that works, as proven by the best available evidence.

That is not necessarily a randomised controlled trial — the gold standard. For example, we know the dangers of smoking and advise against it. This is not based on randomised controlled studies, but observations of what happens to smokers and non-smokers.

But there are still some no-go areas for me: homeopathy, for instance, has never been shown to work in scientific studies. In fact, many trials have shown that it doesn’t work at all.

That’s why for my bad back, I’m taking paracetamol, doing the exercises that my physiotherapist recommended — and now also having my first session of acupuncture.