Patients are being continuously and seriously misled by both sides of the debate on complementary medicine, a leading professor in the UK has claimed.

According to Prof Edzard Ernst, a professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, one of the most important questions about complementary medicine – does it generate more harm than good – remains unanswered. The reason for this is because two alternative and antagonistic attitudes are influencing the evidence, he said.

Prof Ernst insisted that sceptics in this area often ignore the evidence for complementary medicine.

“Despite thousands of clinical trials and hundreds of systematic reviews, mainstream journals rarely publish positive findings, giving the impression that little serious research is being done in this field, or that the findings show complementary medicine to be useless or even dangerous”, he said.

In contrast, proponents claim that ‘scientific evidence cannot be applied to complementary medicine’ when the data fails to show what they had hoped for.

However the real loser in these ongoing disputes, he warned, is the patient.

He said that complementary medicine has become important not because of the eagerness of doctors, the interests of scientists or the attention of politicians, but because of the ‘almost insatiable hunger of patients’.

He said reliable information intended specifically for lay people must be produced as a matter of urgency.

Prof Ernst makes his comments in the journal, BMJ Clinical Evidence.