Band 6+: Nowadays, a growing number of people with health problems are trying alternative medicines and treatments instead of visiting their usual doctor. Do you think this is a positive or a negative development?

Studies about how people deal with medical care show that untraditional medical techniques

are gaining more and more patients and, at the same time, alternative medicines are sometimes preferred to traditional ones. While, it is avalilable a multitude of data regarding the growth of alternative treatments, details about those techniques and their actual results are not easy to find. Thus, one can ask wheter these therapies are positively contributing to health care. The only possible answer to this question must come from an institutional approvement, which is currently unachievable beacuse of the lack of adequate experimental data.

Alternative medical techniques have different kinds of origin, such as religious, academic or popular. Some of these therapies appears to be well structured and based on scientific approaches, however this is not the most occuring case. For instance, in answer to the growing deseases caused by the interaction with digital devices, some untraditional tratments provide patients medicines even though those substances have not been experimentally tested on animals before. Clearly, it is necessary an institutional regulation of these new approaches for health care.

While it is true that the born of new medical tretments is fundamental to pursue an development in health care, untraditional therapies are not the adequate way to realize this.

Not only do these techniques generate dangerous situations but they are also create obstacles to traditional medical research. The growing number of patients suffering a failure of untraditional treatments is requiring an increase in traditional therapies to counteract this unexpected effects. This is reducing the public founds for medical research, which have to be used to save the life of that people. Therefore, overall these treatments are generating negative effects on health care and are not contributing to a positive development of mediine.

In my opinion, any unruled medical treatment should be illegal and a well-defined

procedures for the regulation of new medical approaches should be issued. In this way, the possibility to acces new therapies is not eliminated but it is adequately ruled, so that negative effects on patients are minimized. Moreover, untraditional techniques with a solid scientific and having obtained positive experimental results may gain institutional approvement and finally determine an improvement in health care.