The morbidity from illness in our world is at crisis level There is an epidemic of obesity throughout the world, particularly in America and Australia this is associated with an epidemic of diabetes. We have failed to deal with the degenerative diseases of Western society, the epidemic of AIDS, and the spread of new diseases and new resistant bacteria due to climate change and the wide use of antibiotics.

The greatest killer in our society is cardiovascular disease. In Australia one person dies of a heart attack every ten minutes. One in ten people with end up with cancer of the colon. In Australia, two out of three people will end up with skin cancer. Fifty percent of adult Australians have hypertension and thirty percent have raised cholesterol.

Sixty three percent of people attending general practice have some evidence of mental disorder. Twenty five percent are disabling. Young people with mental disorder are particularly poorly served by our current general medical practice system. This is a remarkable finding as eighty percent of the Australian population attend general medical practices. The major killers in our society, which are cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis and arthritis are all related to stress, and this often has its origins in the very early developmental years of our patients. A quarter of Australian men do not reach the age of 65. The majority of these die of heart attacks and cancer. The average Australian male aged between 25 and 45 has a one in ten chance of having a heart attack, or getting cancer and a four in ten chance of being disabled by an accident or illness by the age of 65.

The cost of our health service is enormous and it cannot continue to rely on band-aid approaches, particularly as the mass of the populace is becoming more aware of the importance and significance of holistic medicine and the way that rapport and understanding from a genuine health professional can help them heal. It is predicted that by the year 2015, one in three people will be suffering from a form of depression which will be severe enough to require medication. It has been said quite simply by Professor Montgomery at Bond University in Queensland, that depression can also be treated by psycho-social means, without the use of drugs whatsoever. Surely this would be a better option. (And exercise has been shown to be more effective than anti-depressants - possibly somewhat due to the 'social aspects' of exercise, but also due to the exercise itself - English study.

Medicine is tremendous in its ability to cater for the acute emergency or illness, but when we see that the majority of our population is suffering from degenerative diseases, and will, as they age suffer from more chronic problems, such as dementia, we realise that there must be other ways of healing.

Epidemiology data from Australia and the USA show that there has been no improvement in cancer mortality in males and females in the last fifty years. In fact in males, there has been an increase in mortality over the past fifty years.