We hear a lot of complementary practitioners complain that medical doctors don’t want to work with them, hospitals don’t want to work with them, doctors look down on them, and because of that, integrative medicine is difficult to achieve. And yes, there are situations where that happens. There are practitioners who have had that experience, and we cannot just pretend that it doesn’t happen.
But at the same time, we think there is another side to this conversation that practitioners also need to look at. Is the problem always the practice itself, or sometimes is it the practitioner?
Because if we are saying that we want medical doctors to work with us, we want referrals, we want collaboration and we want complementary and conventional healthcare to work together, then we also have to ask ourselves whether we are actually doing the things that make that possible.
For example, a patient goes to a hospital and tells the doctor that they have been taking a herbal preparation. The doctor asks what exactly is in it, what is the dosage, how long have you been taking it, what else are you taking, and the practitioner has not really documented any of these things, or maybe the practitioner does not even want to disclose what is inside the product because it is a “secret formulation.” What exactly do we expect the doctor to do with that information?
And this is where patient safety comes into the conversation.
It is not necessarily because the doctor hates herbal medicine or hates complementary medicine. There may be concerns about herb-drug interactions, about what the patient has taken, about the dosage, about what happens if something goes wrong. The doctor has a responsibility to the patient too.
So, if we want to work in a modern healthcare environment, then we have to understand that the standards of that environment matter.
This does not mean that everything has to be based only on published research. We don’t believe that. There are things that research has not caught up with yet. There is also knowledge that practitioners learn from other practitioners, especially senior practitioners. A lot of practical knowledge in healthcare is learned that way. Even in surgery, there are things you learn by watching somebody who has done it for many years, assisting them, practising under supervision and learning from their experience.
But that does not mean we should reject research when it is available.
If there is evidence available, we should be willing to look at it. If there are new things to learn, we should learn them. If there are workshops, conferences, seminars, CPDs and training programmes available, practitioners should be taking advantage of them. There are even so many good educational resources online now that you can sit in your house and learn things that were not available to practitioners twenty years ago.
The point is that we should keep improving.
And we also need to stop thinking that one bad practitioner represents an entire discipline. If a surgeon makes a terrible mistake during an operation, we don’t say surgery is bad and all surgeons are bad. We look at what happened with that particular practitioner.
The same thing should apply to complementary practice.
But then we also have to be honest enough to say that if there are practitioners who are poorly trained, who make exaggerated claims, who don’t document properly, who refuse to learn, who practise outside their competence or who engage in things that put patients at risk, then practitioners within that profession should be willing to speak about it too.
Because if we want people to respect the discipline, we have to respect the discipline ourselves.
And sometimes that means looking beyond promoting your own name and actually promoting the profession. Instead of every practitioner trying to prove that they are the only person who can do something, maybe we should be doing more to explain what the discipline actually is, what it can do, what it cannot do, where the evidence is, where the evidence is still developing and when a patient should be referred elsewhere.
That is how trust is built.
At the end of the day, if we genuinely want integrative healthcare, it cannot just be about asking medical doctors to accept us. We also have a responsibility to become practitioners that other healthcare professionals can actually work with.
So maybe the question is not always, “Why don’t they want to work with us?”
Maybe sometimes we should also ask:
“What are we doing to make it easier for them to work with us?”
Because perhaps the problem is not always the practice.
Sometimes, we need to look at the practitioner.
Curious Fact of the Week
The World Health Organization has released a new Global Research Priorities and Agenda for Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine for 2025–2034. The agenda identifies priority areas for research and points out that traditional, complementary and integrative medicine currently receives less than 1% of global health research funding.
This is interesting because the conversation around complementary medicine is no longer simply about whether these practices should exist. Increasingly, the conversation is also about how they can be properly studied, regulated, practised safely and integrated into health systems where appropriate.
WHO’s broader 2025–2034 strategy has four major areas of focus: strengthening the evidence base, supporting safe and effective practice through appropriate regulation, integrating safe and effective approaches into health systems, and improving collaboration across sectors.
For practitioners, that should be encouraging.
There is a growing opportunity to move the conversation forward. But that opportunity also comes with responsibility. Better training, better documentation, better communication, better research and better professional standards all have a place in where complementary and integrative healthcare goes next.
Maybe this is exactly the direction practitioners should be preparing for.
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