A LONG-TIME naturopath who’s been left helpless as his business declines is hoping for a change of heart from the Federal Government, as it considers the future of natural therapies rebates.
The government received strong community backlash to its changes, which scrapped rebates to almost 20 natural therapies from private health insurance cover.
The change came into effect in April, but so strong was the reaction, that a $2 million review of the changes was swiftly announced by Health Minister Greg Hunt.
Buderim naturopath Eric Fairbank, who in November will mark 30 years practising, said he’d been forced to watch his business “steadily decline”, after covered patients dropped from three in four to “one in 10”.
He said he’d hoped to stay practising three days a week for the next 10-15 years, but the changes had effectively halved his business operations.
With the same overheads, he said it would quickly become too expensive, and no longer worth staying in practice, unless some of the changes were undone.
“Basically my whole clinic was affected entirely,” he said.
Mr Fairbank had practised western herbal medicine, nutrition, homoeopathy and general naturopathy.
He has spent more than a decade in formal study, as well as ongoing education through his working life, and had spent five years working at a pharmacy in Pomona, introducing customers to natural medicines.
Mr Fairbank said recent research he’d seen in an Australian Medical Association journal had shown a 50 per cent increase in people going to complementary medicine practitioners like him.
He said one of the things that had hurt about the original changes had been the finding that natural therapies were ineffective.
He said there were “mountains of research” in the US and Europe showing the effectiveness of the therapies, which he said had been ignored.
“We feel we have been hard done by,” Mr Fairbank said.
He hoped private health rebates would be restored for a lot of the therapies by April 1 next year, after the review.
“This is crucial,” he said.