A SENIOR doctor has launched a full-blooded attack on alternative health, claiming that homoeopathic remedies almost killed one of his patients.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, Dr Roger Fisken, a consultant physician at the Friarage hospital, Northallerton, said he was "appalled" at the idea that conventional medicine should work more closely with alternative medicine.

Dr Fisken said he had to "rescue" a man after his daughter told the doctor that she had substituted homeopathic remedies for conventional medicine.

As a result of this treatment, the patient was admitted to hospital suffering from severe heart failure.

The North Yorkshire consultant said: "If we join forces with alternative medicine we are not only betraying our scientific heritage but we are also a short step away from betraying our patients."

Dr Fisken said it had taken hundreds of years to pull medicine away from "the quagmire of superstition, witchcraft, mumbo-jumbo, and sheer quackery" and turn it into something resembling a scientific pursuit.

Now that progress seemed to be in danger "because we are too gutless to stand up to the criticism of scientific rationalism being offered to anyone who will listen."

The idea that it was impossible to be a good scientist and a caring, compassionate doctor was "nonsense", he added.

It was due to the laws of physics and chemistry that we now knew that typhoid could be prevented by good public health and vaccination "rather than by sacrificing goats at midnight," the consultant added.

But Dr Fisken's views were dismissed as "out-of-date" by Melanie Oxley, director of politics with the Society of Homeopaths.

A recent poll showed 74pc of the British public thought complementary medicine should be part of the NHS, she said.

"This is a minority view. Many doctors now practise homeopathy, acupuncture and other complementary therapies and that is what the public seems to want."