[Bridge between scientific medicine and complementary medicine--utopia?]

In this keynote presentation on a complex and controversial subject, I attempt to answer the following questions: 1. What is scientific medicine, what is alternative medicine? 2. Why is there in our days an increasing trend in the population towards concepts and methods of alternative (complementary) medicine? 3. Why are many scientific physicians defensive, sceptical and opposed to alternative medicine? 4. Are traditional and alternative medicine fundamentally irreconcilable worlds? The author believes that complementary medicine is beneficial and justified especially in private practice, above all in the many patients suffering from psychosomatic, psychovegetative, neurotic, depressive, functional disorders, with feelings of ill-health and often with marked subjective symptoms but in which no severe organic disease is present. In these types of patients alternative methods are often 'more gentle' and cost-effective. The doctor's personality, his empathy, his willingness to communicate are decisive factors for their effectiveness. Certain methods of complementary medicine should be increasingly integrated into our hospitals and be learnt and critically assessed locally by the scientific physicians. Scientific medicine is and remains the indispensable solid foundation for correctly indicating the use of alternative therapeutic methods.