Help, I'm suffering from alternative medicine

I have under my desk a sackful of pills, potions and supplements sent to me by companies eager for publicity for their curious nostrums. Picking out four at random here is: Kava Kava extract (an aid to relaxation); Powerlean (that's linoleic acid to you - said to help "significant inch loss" around waist and thighs); Beano (for intestinal wind); and something called Oleomed, which contains virgin olive oil in capsules and is good for the joints, skin and cholesterol level. (Why not buy it by the bottle, I wonder, pour it over a salad and get a double health whammy - and it's delicious, too.)

I have under my desk a sackful of pills, potions and supplements sent to me by companies eager for publicity for their curious nostrums. Picking out four at random here is: Kava Kava extract (an aid to relaxation); Powerlean (that's linoleic acid to you - said to help "significant inch loss" around waist and thighs); Beano (for intestinal wind); and something called Oleomed, which contains virgin olive oil in capsules and is good for the joints, skin and cholesterol level. (Why not buy it by the bottle, I wonder, pour it over a salad and get a double health whammy - and it's delicious, too.)

My mother used to say more than 30 years ago, after slaving over a hot stove, how she looked forward to the day when we would all be able to live on pills. How amazed she would have been to find now we can.

My stash grows by the week and I would be happy to give the lot to any reader prepared to make a worthwhile donation to Mencap, the mental health charity. It would leave me with more leg-room which is also rapidly being eaten up by the growing stack of alternative medicine books under my desk, which I am happy to offer on the same terms to any reader with an empty bookcase to fill.

The pills and the books are testimony to the growing presence of complementary medicine in our lives. Everyone is at it and there is a simple reason why: it does no harm.

The same certainly cannot be said of orthodox medicine. We all want a risk free-cure and complementary medicine seems to promise just that. The problem is that anything that does no harm is probably doing no good either just because it isn't doing anything.

Never mind, family doctors are now leaping on the bandwagon as they recognise that it offers a cheap and cheerful way of keeping patients off their backs. What do you do about tiresome Mrs A who keeps coming to the surgery complaining of stress? Pack her off for a bit of autogenic relaxation training. Even if it doesn't help her relax it should help you. I am being too cynical, of course. If it works, why not? Let's open the surgery doors to the reflexologists and kinesiologists, to the polarity therapists and magnotherapists and let the patients decide. Whatever turns them on.

This seems to me to be pushing patient power a tad too far. Edzard Ernst, the professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter thinks so too. When doctors argue, as increasingly they do, that we should drop our rigid demand for scientific evidence of the efficacy of complementary medicine because there are many orthodox medicines now in use - most antibiotics, for example - that have never been formally tested in clinical trials, Professor Ernst's response is: two wrongs don't make a right. "They may call it pragmatism, I call it bad science," he said.

It is claimed there has to be something in complementary medicine because traditional therapies have been practised for thousands of years. That doesn't mean we can't learn new facts about them. Professor Ernst says only in the last two years has the pecking order of the main therapies altered, herbal medicine rising up the scale as new evidence of its efficacy emerges, while chiropractic has slipped down the scale as signs of the damage it can do become clearer.

No, don't be fooled. There is no such thing as the risk-free cure. If it cures, it can harm, too.