Back in the summer I was surprised, and disappointed, to hear that the Park Attwood Clinic, a centre for complementary medicine near Kidderminster, had closed. It was, as far as I’m aware, the only in-patient centre for mistletoe therapy in the UK.
What’s mistletoe therapy? Well, it’s a complementary therapy for cancer treatment, used alongside conventional therapy, and incredibly popular in Europe. About 40% of cancer patients in Germany are prescribed mistletoe therapy, and mistletoe preparations are one of the best-selling cancer drugs in western Europe.
Not in Britain though. We don’t seem to have embraced the therapy nearly so much. It’s never quite clear why. It does have very Germanic roots, pioneered in the 1920s and 30s by Rudolf Steiner, amongst others, and still mostly prepared and administered using his anthroposophic approach. And the technique is not without controversy, but this blog isn’t the place to discuss medical pros and cons.
I had heard, on the grapevine, that the centre had actually simply relocated, to Kent, but I wasn’t sure where or when. So it was useful, and reassuring, to have an email today from the Raphael Medical Centre in Hildenborough, near Tonbridge, announcing resumption of the therapy there.
The medical team is led, as before, by Dr Maurice Orange, and there are outreach clinics in Gloucestershire (I assume that’ll be St Lukes Clinic here in Stroud), Aberdeenshire, Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire and Devon.
For a full list of mistletoe therapy centres in the UK please visit http://www.mistletoetherapy.org.uk/ and click on Therapy Centres.