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It's cheaper and has no nasty side-effects

Prince Charles has sparked a furore by backing complementary medicines hours after leading doctors called on the NHS to stop funding them. Here, Britain's top homoepath insists the Prince is right. What do you think? Join in our great health debate...

Many people who read the headlines might think that our health service is awash with complementary treatments. But nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, less than one per cent of the NHS budget is spent on these so-called "alternative therapies" - everything from chiropractic and acupuncture to herbalism and massage.

What's more, these therapies are cheaper and, in many cases, have a more positive effect on a patient's general well-being than conventional drugs.

For many alternative therapies, there is also concrete evidence of the specific health benefits and financial savings. In France and Germany, where there is much greater integration of conventional and alternative medicine, the pluses are numerous.

Around 20 per cent of all GPs in France practise acupuncture and their patients consistently require fewer antibiotics and steroids than those who are treated using only conventional means.

And in Britain, over the past five years, alternative treatments have been shown not only to ease symptoms, but to be more cost-effective than conventional drugs.

A clinical trial of the effects of acupuncture on migraine sufferers, for example, produced heartening results. When 400 migraine sufferers were studied, those treated with acupuncture made 25 per cent fewer visits to specialists and 15 per cent fewer visits to their GPs than those relying solely on the most common prescription drug, Naramig.

And over the course of a year, those being treated conventionally suffered headaches for three weeks longer than the people treated with acupuncture. Although the acupuncture sessions were more expensive than the conventional medicine in this instance, their effects lasted twice as long.

Another good example is herbalism. As a remedy for depression, studies have consistently shown that the herbal preparation St John's Wort outperforms prescription anti-depressants. It also has fewer side-effects. While anti-depressants can increase suicidal tendencies and cause side-effects such as muscle pain in some patients, the only real downside of St John's Wort is that it can interfere with the effectiveness of other medicines, including the contraceptive pill when taken by women.

I first encountered the alternative approach to medicine more than 30 years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge studying medicine. On a field trip to China, I was astonished to see a woman having surgery on her abdomen without an anaesthetic. To manage the pain, all she had was three little acupuncture needles in her left ear.

This was something I hadn't been taught in any Cambridge lecture and even now, more than a quarter of a century later, there is still huge resistance to anything labelled "alternative" by the medical fraternity.

The sad truth is that the profits made by the drugs companies are so often the driving force behind accepted conventional medicine. And since there is no commercial gain to be derived from prescribing alternative therapies, the conventional medical world resists them. You can't patent a herb or an acupuncture needle, so there simply aren't the profit margins to be made.

But my greatest misgiving about the prospect of removing these treatments from the NHS is the detrimental effect it will undoubtedly have on patients.

The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, where I work, is an NHS hospital. Patients come to us for an integrated treatment programme of both conventional and alternativetherapies. If alternative medicine is forced underground, it is the patients who will suffer.

Time and again, they tell us how grateful they are to receive all their treatment in one place, rather than traipsing from one clinic to the next.

What's more, they know that the alternative therapists at the Royal London are recognised by conventional medical practitioners, and they don't have to worry about trying to verify the qualifications of alternative therapists themselves.

If these therapies are no longer available in mainstream medicine and patients have to go to private clinics instead, it will not only increase inequality of care, but affect the stress levels of sick patients.

Without this integrated approach, patients will lose out. But so, too, will NHS accountants, who will be faced with a rising bill for the treatment of an increasingly ill population with expensive conventional drugs.

Dr Fisher is clinical director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital and homeopath to the Queen.