Non Conventional Medicines (NCM): Italy’s Health Systems and the New Health Paradigms

Abstract

After analysing the factors behind the mounting demand for Non Conventional Medicine (NCM) worldwide, paralleling loss of ascendancy on the part of western biomedicine and its increasingly unsustainable cost, we focus on the new paradigm of Person-Centred Medicine, and how NCM holds pride of place within that paradigm. Our article goes on to analyse the Italian scenario in the light of the ever-greater insistence by individuals on personally-tailored treatment and the new health paradigms. Although legislatively Italy (2013) is one of the most backward countries on the European scene where NCM is concerned, the regional health systems are nonetheless responding to NCM. In order to show to what extent that is so, we focus on three major regions each typical of a health system approach and a geographical area: Lombardy, Tuscany and Campania. We show that Italy is indeed still in the first stages of including NCM or Person-Centred Medicine, and that the process varies widely across the independent regional health systems. Policy here is often dictated by factors in the local background.