The Wellness Warrior
MICHAEL DIXON, UK He courted controversy by saying doctors have lost their power to heal He has always believed in one simple truth: As a doctor, if you can’t tell in ten minutes what’s wrong with a patient, then you probably don’t know what you are talking about. Modern medicine, he says, has nothing to offer to those suffering from chronic conditions, headaches to backaches to frequent infections. “Instead of healing, doctors routinely give them some tablets or send them to someone else,” says Dr Dixon. That disenchantment, what he calls “purely selfish reasons”, drove him towards alternative solutions.
That also led him to set up College Surgery in Cullompton, Devon. Here people are steered towards approaches that help them get better. If you have a problem that needs a conventional medicine, you would be given that. If you have that chronic pain, tiredness or infection, Dr Dixon might give you a herbal remedy that you can buy from a health food shop.
The idea of integrating different types of healing is something that is ahead of its time, he believes. A vociferous section of British doctors, however, has called Dr Dixon’s approach a “smokescreen for unproven treatments”. But he argues that the efficacy of complementary treatments simply cannot be measured by standard lab tests. “Patients should never be forced into an either/or situation.”