Those who feel they have seen some benefit from complimentary or alternative medicines/treatments should be perfectly at liberty to seek them out. That's not what I have an issue with, unless they try and discourage people from seeking out their GP or conventional health cures in favour of their favourite alternative treatment de jour . My problem here is with Charlie attempting to leverage his undue influence consequent from his position of extreme privilege behind the scenes in order to divert public monies into pet projects of his.
More generally though, any complimentary or alternative treatment that had proven,genuine efficacy would no longer be complimentary or alternative - it would be simply be medicine. Acupuncture is a case in point- It has achieved a limited recognition of efficacy (although this is still hotly contested) for the treatment of lower back pain, and in consequence NICE has recommended that acupuncture can be prescribed on the NHS in the treatment of this specific issue.Sceptics would argue that it has arrived at this position simply because we have no very effective treatment for long term back pain, but again thats a slightly different issue.
And if you want to get such health treatments as Reiki, or Bachs Flower Remedies, or Homeopathic tinctures or sugar pills, or any one of a number of dubious alternative remedies,be my guest - but I would hope that you would first make sure you have done some due diligence - not just elect for such remedies based only upon anecdotal evidence based upon the supposed success of such a remedy for what are usually self-correcting illnesses in the first place. or what your Grannie told you, or what your favourite magazine or newspaper ran as a health feature.
And if, despite this, you still wish to proceed with such a therapy, again, be my guest - but you should fund it out of your own pocket, not waste valuable public money and resources on it. Fortunately, the amount of money the NHS is wasting on Homeopathic remedies and treatments is declining, year on year.
And it is not simply not sufficient to claim such therapies have a clinical worth because they are as good as placebo - placebo should be regarded as a baseline benchmark only. All treatments and medications should strive to offer substantially greater benefit than simple placebo. In fact, any new drug or therapy should actually be able to demonstrate a benefit beyond the currently recognised best practice -but that's a whole different story.