"Charlatans": Jérôme Marty's rant against alternative medicine in medical deserts

Are medical deserts the new El Dorado for alternative medicines, like acupuncture, sophrology, naturopathy or even osteopathy ?

In the Eure department, the Amfreville-Saint-Amand health center, a "spacious and modern building" built in 2021, as reported by Actu.fr , does not accommodate any conventional medicine practitioners. It does, however, accommodate those who engage in "unconventional healthcare practices" (UNCPs), according to the Ministry of Health's classification.

"They're charlatans," rants Dr. Jérôme Marty on Les Grandes Gueules . "They have nothing to do with medicine, they specialize in well-being, and mutual insurance companies look grim when it comes to reimbursing supplementary medical fees, while they will reimburse 70 euros for an osteopath or a naturopath," he continues.

"Some of these unconventional practices are certainly effective in addressing certain symptoms, but this has been insufficiently or not at all proven. Others, finally, may have harmful effects on health and should therefore be systematically prohibited," explains the Ministry of Health.

In Creuse, within the new "integrative" thermal center of Évaux-les-Bains, an anesthesiologist, "who claims to speak to the dead" was expected to take over as director, before bringing in "well-being" practitioners, reports Le Parisien . Under pressure, the mayor of the town finally abandoned the project. It can also be read that in Aisne, some residents would be receptive to "a sort of call to nature in opposition to Big Pharma and the chemical industry."

"The adverse effects of NCPs are poorly understood, if at all, because there has been no rigorous evaluation prior to their use, and little or no published data. In addition, professionals who use these NCPs do not report these adverse effects," the Ministry of Health points out.

A survey published last March, conducted by OpinionWay for Universcience, warned that more than half of those surveyed (55%) said they trust "alternative and complementary medicine professionals," a frequent source of misinformation. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of those surveyed (79%) said they primarily trust doctors and dieticians or organizations such as Santé publique France (71%).

On May 6, the No FakeMed healthcare collective protested against health insurance reimbursements for "pseudotherapies," including osteopathy, sparking irritation among some professionals on Tuesday. In 2022, health insurance companies reimbursed one billion euros for alternative medicine services, eight times more than in 2014.

According to the Senate report on supplementary health insurance and mutual insurance, the cost of these practices has increased fivefold over the past eight years, reaching almost 1 billion euros in 2023.

The No FakeMed healthcare collective is targeting the signing of a contract between the National Education system, MGEN and CNP insurance, which allows for the coverage of unconventional healthcare practices such as homeopathy, osteopathy, acupuncture and naturopathy for its civil servants, AFP explained.

And this in a context where "proven therapies" - such as psychology, prescribed sports or dietetics - are, themselves, "rarely covered by mutual insurance companies", notes the collective.

It should also be noted that the Senate and the government agreed on Tuesday to adopt two "complementary" measures on access to care, the first to regulate the establishment of doctors, the second to organize their "solidarity" towards medical deserts, a flagship measure of the " pact" proposed by François Bayrou.