Dear Minister Frank Vandenbroucke,
There are moments when a society betrays itself, not through war or crisis, but through the subtle conviction that only what is measurable may still hold value.
We live in an age where a blood value sometimes carries more weight than a human story. Where a laboratory report is believed faster than the body of the one who lives in it every day.
And yet the human body remains a wondrous universe that cannot always be reduced to graphs, statistics, or protocols.
Fortunately so. Otherwise we would no longer be human beings, but walking Excel files with a health insurance number.
I am not writing you this letter out of rebellion against conventional medicine. On the contrary. I am grateful for science when it saves lives, relieves pain, and propels knowledge forward. But science was never originally meant to be a closed cathedral of absolute truths. It began as curiosity. As humility before the unknown.
That is precisely why it moves me deeply when homeopathy, natural medicine, and acupuncture are increasingly dismissed collectively as though they were nothing more than folkloric footnotes from an irrational past.
Yet that past is remarkably long.
Acupuncture was already being practiced when Europe still believed evil spirits caused headaches.
Herbal medicine existed centuries before the first pharmaceutical multinational.
Man treated himself with plants, touch, energy, rest, and observation long before he began printing three-page lists of side effects in size-4 font.
And yes, not everything in natural medicine is sacred. But not everything in conventional medicine is flawless either. Feel free to ask the package insert of any medication; it sometimes reads like an existentialist thriller.
For people like me, moreover, this is not a philosophical debate.
Since childhood I have reacted dangerously allergic to a large part of conventional medication.
What many call "standard treatment" can feel, for my body, like Russian roulette in a white doctor's coat. Under such circumstances, alternative and complementary treatments become not a luxury, not a passing trend, and certainly not an ideology, but a necessary search for balance.
Because health is more than symptom management alone.
A human being is not merely biochemistry.
We are also emotion, stress, memory, environment, nutrition, sleep, trauma, breath, connection, and meaning. The body constantly speaks a language that modern society sometimes seems to have forgotten how to understand.
A holistic vision does not mean rejecting science. It means acknowledging that a human being is more than the sum of their organs.
Perhaps true intelligence lies not in eliminating everything that cannot be perfectly explained, but in the capacity to bear complexity without immediately wanting to dominate it.
Because honestly, Minister:
a society that only still believes in what is patentable risks losing its soul.
I am therefore not asking you to replace conventional medicine.
I am asking you to let go of the arrogance of absolute exclusivity.
Let there be room for dialogue between disciplines. For integrative care.
For doctors who dare to listen.
For patients who know their own bodies. For people who fall between the protocols.
Because compassion is not pseudoscience.
Humanity does not need a double-blind placebo trial to prove its worth.
And perhaps, just perhaps,
a society is only truly healthy when it doesn't just ask:
"Does it work statistically?"
but above all:
"Does it help the person?"
With sincere hope for more wisdom, nuance, and humanity in health policy,
Sophie MG
