Credit must be given to those with the courage and persistence to continue and promote alternative, complementary or integrative medicine. So-called modern or allopathic medicine should not dismiss other forms of treatment as quack. The proof of the efficacy of any treatment is cure ie, to restore a body cell, tissue or organ to its normal healthy state.

Let's consider the chronic degenerative diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, migraine, arthritis, Alzheimer, Parkinson, etc. These diseases are termed chronic because modern medicine has failed to find a cure. Most treatment is linked to long-term intake of drugs to control the symptoms by interfering with our body's biochemical processes. Ultimately, we suffer from various side effects, become addicted to and experience serious damage to our kidney and liver due to these drugs.

All drugs have to pass the randomised double blind test before they are approved for release in the market. A new drug may cost up to US$300 million and 7-10 years of development work which any pharmaceutical company would like to recoup in the shortest possible time. It must be highlighted that any approved drug is not completely safe for all humans as pharmaceutical companies will perform evaluation test on say few thousand paid volunteers and then extrapolate the results to few hundred thousand or a million people.

Even if there is a 1:100,000 risk of a drug causing serious side effects or even death it can still be approved if the benefits outweigh the risk. What has happened to the Hippocratic principle of 'do no harm'?

Medical journals depend on advertising revenue from pharmaceutical companies and are unlikely to include articles that cast aspersion on any drugs in the market. Drug researchers also get research sponsorship and/or paid holidays from pharmaceutical companies who will reserve the right to edit the content of a research article prior to publication or reject it outright.

Also research done by unknown researchers will be taken over in name only by well-known researchers to give it authority and credibility, a kind of acceptable plagiarism. Where is the ethical practice of medical researchers? All these unethical methods are exposed in Lynne McTaggart book What doctors don't tell you which is available in our bookshops.

The Ministry of Health (MOH) should continue to allow all treatment using alternative, complementary, integrative and modern medicine to continue and flourish in Malaysia. Patients must realise that it is our body and our health (and our money) which is at stake and we should be given the freedom to decide which treatment we want. Any treatment that doesn't work is unsustainable and will die its natural death. The MOH role would be to ban through enforcement or legal means any treatment which is obviously harmful and to maintain an open mind on this subject of treatment.