The Swiss people have voted five Complementary Medical Therapies back onto the Swiss Health system for ‘paid for health therapies’.
Previously taken off the list of therapies accepted as ‘insurable health costs’ by the Swiss Government, these five therapies are now back on the list after two thirds of the population voted in their favour.
The five therapies are homeopathy, herbal medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Holistic medicine (“This method looks holistically at the body, life force, soul and spirit. Care involves a holistic treatment with natural substances as well as conventional medical drugs.”), and Neural Therapy (based on the theory that trauma can produce long-standing disturbances in the electrochemical function of tissues. Treatment tries to affect the nervous system with injections of local anaesthetics.”).
These therapies will be ‘re-imbursable’ from 2012 and will be officially “on test” – to prove their worth – until 2017.
A spokesperson from the Federation of Swiss Societies of Complementary Medicine, Hansueli Albonico said “" I really welcome this move towards the international arena. I see this as a great opportunity. In Germany, for example, the medical profession has been engaged in a dialogue for the past decade on pluralism in medicine and applying different methods – always with a view to effectiveness, appropriateness and efficiency...... We need a shift away from methods used for testing effectiveness, such as are appropriate for drugs, to studies that show the overall benefit provided by these [complementary] methods”
The head of communications from the Swiss Interior Ministry explained, “Until now we have not been able to prove fully that these five therapies are efficient, cost-effective and suitable. Some do it more than others. The goal of these six years is to fill in the gaps for those that don’t manage to [meet these criteria] or do so only partially. We’ll see what happens, we cannot prejudge the results.”
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