It is currently fashionable to attack Complementary and Alternative Medicine for its apparent ‘lack of evidence’. As I’ve pointed out many times, this would not be unreasonable were orthodox medicine fully or even nearly fully evidence based. Unfortunately it is not with only 13% of all interventions proven to be beneficial and another 23% ‘likely to be beneficial’ according to the BMJ’s book on Clinical Evidence.

However there is one form of CAM for which I’ve never seen anything other than praise. Even Professor Edzard Ernst, perhaps the world authority on using evidence based medicine (EBM) as a blunt instrument to attack homeopathy and CAM exclusively, glowingly praises Autogenic Therapy! So what is Autogenic Therapy?

I’ve provided a brief vodcast to introduce AT >

Facts on Stress and Health

• All doctors agree that a large proportion of patients are suffering from illnesses caused or at least made worse by stress.
• Some illnesses such as stomach ulcers, certain headaches, irritable bowel syndrome are known to be caused or made much worse by stress.
• GPs, although they know about the health risks of stress have neither the tools or the time to teach patients effective relaxation.
• Thus patients with stress-problems tend to end up with treatment of the symptoms of stress rather than getting help with dealing with the stress that is the cause of the symptoms.

Autogenic Therapy

-      is a powerful stress-releasing technique that can be learned by almost anyone including children.

-      could easily be taught in the evenings in the waiting areas of NHS GPs but this just isn’t happening.

-      is available only at one NHS hospital – The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital

I personally think it’s a disgrace that an excellent, effective and non-controversial form of CAM that is capable of helping hundreds of thousands of people suffering from stress-related conditions is virtually ignored by a media that is only too happy to quote any doctor who criticises CAM.

So let’s hear some encouraging noise for Autogenic Therapy! Oh I forgot, you can’t put it into a bottle and market it as a magic product – so maybe it’s worthless after all.

Autogenic Therapy

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The word ‘stress’ is so commonly heard these days that it’s difficult to believe that it has only been used in the context of the human condition for about 80 years. It was introduced by endocrinologist, Hans Selye, who did a huge amount of work that demonstrated the role of stress hormones (mainly adrenalin and noradrenalin) in the causation of disease. Since then, doctors have been convinced that stress is the cause or exacerbating feature in a large proportion of patients consulting them.

In the mid 20^th century this led to the prescription of minor tranquilisers such as Valium (diazepam) for so many stressed-out patients that The Rolling Stones even wrote a song about it. This chemical way of dealing with stress became unfashionable as we found out that these ‘minor tranquilisers’ were dangerously addictive.

Before the first Valium was popped however, a system of teaching profound relaxation to patients was developed in Germany and later in Canada. It was called Autogenic Training (Therapy) and it’s premise was simple: If you teach patients to suggest to themselves that they have the physical symptoms experienced by people in deep meditation or hypnosis, they too will experience profound relaxation of mind and body with the potential of huge benefits to physical health.

The founders (Johannes Schulz and Wolfgang Luther) spend decades perfecting the technique until they settled on a highly effective way of teaching the technique to patients either individually or in groups over 8-10 sessions. Results in all sorts of stress-related chronic problems such as insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, anxiety, migraine and many other problems were excellent and continue to be so.

So the $64 000 question is: Why is Autogenic Therapy not well known?

There is so much stress around that I think there is a strong case for AT to be available in every GP’s waiting room every night. You can get Autogenic Training (AT) lessons on the NHS at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital with a simple GP referral and there are quite a few (though not nearly enough) AT teachers all over the country. That it is hardly known is a total disgrace. What reason can there be for this? That it’s not available in a bottle? Surely not.

Professor Edzard Ernst is well known to readers of this blog as one of homeopathy’s most vicious critics. When he implied that homeopaths are lying to their patients I challenged him to a duel but I am not here today to bury Ernst but to praise him. For guess what? He is a patron of the British Autogenic Society and loves AT! So my question to Ernst is the following: Why spend so much of your time trashing CAM and homeopathy in particular when you know how good AT is and how badly it needs publicity. Why not spend more time promoting  those so-called ‘alternative and complimentary’ approaches that even you know work instead of writing negative, sneering articles and books about those you are sceptical about?

For more information on Autogenic Therapy contact the British Society for Autogenic Therapy.

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This newly re-loaded site will publish useful medical information as well as strong opinions on current medical issues. I will not be shy to confront the more controversial issues of our time and will be happy to publish your comments on any article posted on the site.

I make no bones about being passionate and opinionated about health and medicine. I support and practise whole person orientated medicine and use a variety of medical tools in my practice. These include all the tools of conventional medicine as well as Provocative Therapy, Homeopathy and Autogenic Therapy.

Conventional Medicine:
I certainly did not endure a tough 6 year medical school programme for nothing! Orthodox medical diagnosis and treatment are vital in modern medicine and I will continue to use the principles and practices of conventional medicine whenever I feel they are in the best interest of my patients. Whatever I write here about Provocative Therapy, Homeopathy, Autogenic Therapy and whole person medicine in general should never be taken as disrespect for the fine achievements of conventional scientific medicine.

Homeopathy:
I believe homeopathic medicines are useful, safe and help patients get better quite independent of suggestion or placebo effect. I will defend homeopathy against the attacks of its detractors in the medical profession and popular media. To those particular detractors that deride homeopathy for not being ‘evidence based’ I say that I disagree with your interpretation of the available data and more importantly I say that huge swathes of orthodox medical interventions are far from evidence based. And I have evidence for saying this. Just look at this pie published by the British Medical Journal’s Clinical Evidence!

I will not hesitate to throw this pie in the face of anyone who attacks homeopathy for not being evidence based. People in glass houses really shouldn’t throw stones nor be surprised when their targets gently throw pies in their faces!

Autogenic Therapy:
Stress is a huge factor in medicine yet doctors seldom actually train patients how to release stress and stress-proof themselves. If there was one change I could make to Britain’s NHS it would be to set up an Autogenic clinic in the waiting room of every GP every night. The impact this would make on the health of the nation would be something truly wondrous and it all would be totally cost-effective.

Provocative Therapy:
The cutting edge of the use of clinical reverse psychology and humour in medicine, Provocative Therapy will feature prominently in posts on this site. I believe Provocative Therapy to be a joyous and wonderful form of brief psychotherapy that works quickly and is very cost-effective. On this site, I’ll often use some of the tools of Provocative Therapy to ‘treat’ some of the current issues of the day.

Guest Articles:
I am more than happy to publish guest articles. A patient of mine was so frustrated by what was being said about NHS homeopathy, he researched its cost effectiveness in detail. I was so impressed by his meticulously written article that I’ve published on this site in full. People need to know this sort of information and I’ll be delighted publish material of this quality.

Humour:
Joy, temperance, and repose,
Slam the door on the doctor’s nose.
Thus spake the poet Longfellow.

Temperance: We get helpful advice all over the place these days. People don’t like patronising advice but that won’t stop the ‘authorities’ telling us to eat moderately, that alcoholic drinks ‘all add up’, to eat and drink ’sensibly’ etc. Not that I disagree of course. I just don’t think people respond well to unsolicited advice that they may well find condescending and patronising. Temperance in most things is important but I think humour is  a much better tool of getting the message across than either dour advice or fear mongering.

Repose: Autogenic Therapy is my prescription.

Joy: Yes, joy and happiness are not only important qualities of life, they are actually good for your health. Laughter has important health benefits (see Kaplan’s Mnemonic) and the reverse psychology of Provocative Therapy often lead to hilarious moments in consultations. It can be a joyous moment when you finally get the inner joke of how you are keeping yourself in a state of almost happiness and that you can prescribe the solution to your problem!

Humour and Joy often go together as is evidence by the smiling faces of joyous people. I’ll try to keep things light and joyous on this site. There is enough seriously heavy stuff on the internet so I will try not to add to it.

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We all know that anger is not a good thing. It is the cause of much unnecessary violence which is obviously bad for the recipients and can also have dire consequence such as long cooling-off periods in jail for the perpetrators.

However researchers in the US have found that anger really can suddenly kill you. If you’ve got a healthy heart you are probably safe from suddenly dying due to an anger-induced cardiac event. However if you have an undiagnosed heart arrhythmia (irregular beat), sudden bouts of anger can take you out on the spot according to research at no less than Yale University.

This is vital information for any population undergoing stress which basically means all of us because the economic times are stressful indeed. In any population there are people with undiagnosed heart issues and these people are more vulnerable to sudden lethal cardiac events than average. Thus when we are all more stressed and angry angry people with undiagnosed heart conditions will be more likely to suffer cardiac arrest.

So what can we do about this?

1.    If you have a family history of heart disease, visit your doctor for a check-up.

2.    Chill out! Anger does nobody any good at all. Attend an anger management course, learn a martial art, go dancing, practise meditation or the excellent deep relaxation method called Autogenic Training.

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The poet Longfellow writes:

Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor’s nose.

And ‘slamming the door on the doctor’s nose’ can simply be translated into practising effective personal preventative medicine. Personally, I’d add exercise to the list but that would spoil the metre – so let’s look at the 3 qualities espoused by Longfellow.

JOY: No doubt about it: Love, happiness and laughter are good for your physical health. A pity doctors don’t try to prescribe these much – even though pioneers like Patch Adams, MD have been promoting this sort of ‘medicine’ for some time now.

TEMPERANCE: Doctors have no problem in prescribing this. The problem is more about how to get patients to ‘take the medicine.’ Personally I feel that patients don’t often appreciate direct and unoriginal advice which they can experience as patronising and condescending. Thus they need another way of being persuaded to live healthier lives. More about this in a future post…

REPOSE: Ah, this is the one. How do we rest? How do we release stress? How do we stop being stressed in the first place? All doctors, especially GPs, know that a huge amount of the patients seeing them are suffering from problems either caused or at least exacerbated by stress. But what can they do about it? Tell patients to take it easy? Think that will work?

Fortunately there is something doctors can do about this. Autogenic Therapy is a marvellously effective method of reducing stress. It takes a bit of dedication by the patient but is easy to learn. Just look at what Prof. Edzard Ernst (a man with whom I totally disagree with on so many things, not least homeopathy being available on the NHS) has to say about it in this article written some years ago. I totally agree with every word he writes here. It is a huge pity that he has become well known for trying to ‘debunk’ various forms of holistic medicine and being part of the movement to thwart Britain’s GPs from being able to send patients to NHS homeopathic clinics than for his open endorsement of Autogenic Therapy.

Anyway you can get an excellent eight session course in Autogenic Therapy on the NHS at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (See Prof. Ernst, where else would you get Autogenic Therapy on the NHS if it were not for the RLHH? Can this possibly be a hospital you would like to have removed from the NHS?). To get Autogenic Therapy on the NHS you will need a referral from your GP, but even without that, you can still attend a course there privately at a hugely discounted rate compared to private practice.

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