Welcome to the EFCAM website!
Everyone agrees with the statement: your health is your wealth. EU Charters endorse this and the EU has some impressive public health policies and programmes to support it. Every EU member state has a health department, but many, if not most, are overstretched and under- funded.
Less than 3% of health budgets go to Public Health, health education, health promotion and prevention.
In addition, Europe is faced by complex health issues that our present modern lifestyles contribute to, seen in the increase in degenerative health conditions.
Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) seeks to support the existing medical system and offer real and important means by which scarce resources can be extended.
CAM operates primarily in the field of public health. Its main reason for use by citizens is to maintain health and prevent illness. CAM offers diverse approaches to meet the diversity of people and their health needs and addresses the entire range from health maintenance to treatment of illness, particularly chronic illness.
It also plays an invaluable role in promoting citizen’s health literacy, as many of the modalities covered by CAM invite an active role on behalf of CAM users on their road to health.
Where CAM is available, citizens are choosing it! However, up to the present day, its access is limited to the ones who can afford to pay it out of their own pockets.
While health services are creaking at the seams, CAM professionals, solicited by an ever-increasing percentage of the population, find themselves in the compromising position that most have to offer their services without any official recognition or regulation.
Despite growing demand, based on results and citizen’s satisfaction, their right to work is now compromised in several countries. EFCAM seeks to address this imbalance.
EFCAM is pursuing a sustainable solution that is to everyone’s advantage. We want to make sure that you, the citizen, can have access to a regulated and protected trade, so that you are only offered the highest standard of services. We want to make sure that you, the practitioner, have your right to work recognised, protected and enshrined. We want to make sure that each European government is well informed and can take a structured approach to the regulation of CAM, so that CAM can be better implemented as a supportive body to the existing medical field.
This work is in everyone’s interest.
Our highest priority is therefore to develop a common European system of appropriate regulation of CAM professionals and services to provide EU citizens with equality of access to CAM, which protects both the rights of those who use these services, as well as those who provide them.
This website presents information on what CAM is, its uses, the status of CAM professionals and the steps needed to make CAM available to all EU citizens.
For further information, or if you would like to become an EFCAM member please contact: president@efcam.eu.
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