Submissions to the Medical Board of Australia’s public consultation on a separate set of guidelines for ‘complementary and unconventional medicine and emerging treatments’ closed on 30 June.

We’ve heard that the integrative medicine community really responded to the call to action with over 10,000 submissions received.  Thank you to everyone who took the time to have their say on this important issue.

The Medical Board is now in the process of reading these submissions.  The decision as to what input they regard as relevant or worthy of action resides wholly with the MBA.  While the MBA are a group dedicated to ensuring patient safety, none of them are integrative doctors, none of them truly understand what integrative medicine is.  So it is important that we continue to lobby and educate our governments and medical regulatory bodies about what integrative medicine is (and isn’t) and the enormous benefits of integrative medicine – to the patient, to the health system and to the community.

We urge you to contact your local members – state and federal – and to write to your health ministers – again, state and federal – to educate them about the benefits of integrative medicine and to inform them of the potential consequences if the MBA opts to implement a second set of guidelines.

You can find a list of health ministers with their contact addresses here.

You can find a list of resources on the MBA consultation here.