Professor Marc Cohen, Professor of Complementary Medicine at RMIT University, has said that Australian hospitals can carve a place for alternative therapies like herbal remedies and acupuncture. He said that since 60 per cent of Australians routinely took natural supplements, keeping it in hospitals would allow for better monitoring of patients.
"It's not recorded on their hospital chart, or administered by the nursing staff, and if there was herb or drug nutrient interaction no one is recording that," he told the AAP. "It's an unsupervised practice that is potentially dangerous, and those barriers need to be broken down."
He added that taking St Johns Wort as a natural treatment for depression was known to cause issues with heart medications. "We know some complementary therapies are very effective in chronic conditions, often they are very safe and their costs are far lower than pharmaceuticals," he added.
Prof Cohen also said that hospitals can offer remedies like massage, meditation, yoga and even hypnosis.