Food and Alternative Medicine

Abstract

Concerned with the damage to the environment produced by man and by modern living, the ecology movement and its heirs, the political Green Parties of Europe and the United States, have focused on the environmental issues which have been of increasing concern to large numbers of people. The medical offshoot of the ecology movement has a more chequered history. When clinical ecologists emphasized the dangers that may arise from pollutants in our atmosphere, and in our drinking water and food, their concerns were similar to those of the medical profession in general, and of the specialities of public health medicine and occupational medicine in particular. The clinical ecology movement has now gone much further and has made assertions concerning environmental disease which are not based on objective evidence, but have, in fact, become articles of faith. It is at this point that conventional medicine and clinical ecology part company.