PROFESSOR Michael Baum, who laid into alternative medicine yesterday, is right to be concerned about wasting scarce NHS funds on “unproven or disproved” treatments. But he has the wrong target in his sights. If he wants to root out hype dressed up as science, he would do far better to focus on conventional drugs.

Far too many prescription drugs are marginally effective and carry risks out of proportion to the conditions they are designed to treat. Drug side- effects kill around 10,000 people a year in the UK — three times the number killed on the roads — and cost the NHS more than £4 billion. Patients are being perfectly rational in seeking alternatives and it is simply outdated medical arrogance to condemn them for it.

Only last week it emerged that one of the antidepressant SSRI drugs increased the risk of young adults committing suicide — a possibility that the companies had always strenuously denied even though in 2003 doctors had been advised not to give these drugs to anyone under 18 because of a suicide link. The evidence for that official ruling dated to 1996 but had never been published. During the intervening years British doctors were prescribing more SSRIs to children than any other country in Europe and yet there was no proper evidence base for this at all. Treating those children by changing their diet or with acupuncture seems sane by comparison.

The scandal surrounding the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx — withdrawn from the market in 2004 because it doubled the risk of developing heart disease — is another example of a heavily hyped drug prescribed to millions for whom it was not appropriate. Evidence that there was a danger was once again downplayed or ignored; one expert estimate puts the number of Americans killed or harmed by a drug they took to ease aching joints at 140,000.

Professor Baum demonstrates no understanding of why people are searching for alternatives to his remedies. In any other business, blaming your customers for deserting you would be regarded as self-defeating. If he’s serious about safety and cutting costs, he could start by demanding that drug disasters are followed by an official inquiry and that testing of promising non-drug therapies is properly funded.

Jerome Burne is author of the forthcoming book Food is Better Medicine than Drugs