Prescription for the future

By TOM CLARKE

Doctors of the future will prescribe health supplements along with regular drug-based medicines, says the new general manager of the health supplements company Blackmores.

Alison Quesnel says that health supplements and alternative herbal remedies and treatments such as St Johns Wort, once considered the choice of eccentrics and alternative lifestylers, are now accepted as perfectly normal.

Ten years ago, medical doctors disparaged alternative health products, she says, dismissing them as "witch doctor treatments."

Today they are much more accepting and are very happy to discuss their use with patients.

"Health supplements is a hugely growing industry," she says. "In the grocery sector, which is really opening up now and has been for some years, it is growing at 17 to 22 per cent a year.

"I think that's a market awareness thing.

"Everybody now is interested in health and wellbeing and that has really developed and opened up over the past 10 years.

"Look at aromatherapy, at people going to the gym, and people watching what they're putting in their mouths - they're really thinking about what they're doing to their health."

Some years ago when she worked in a French colony in West Africa, she says, doctors would, as a matter of course, prescribe acidophilus bacilli along with antibiotics, to counteract the negative effects of the antibiotic on the gut.

To her that was an acknowledgment that while antibiotics were good for treating the illness, at the same time there was a need to take other things to make up for their negative effects.

Another example is in Germany, she says, where St John's Wort, a natural alternative to Prozac, is being prescribed in place of the synthetic drug.

Awareness of the positive effects of alternatives is well established in corporate health programmes as well.

Alison Quesnel works in a major corporate centre with its own gymnasium, which is visited once a week by a masseuse.

"Ten years ago that wouldn't have happened," she says, "but today it's totally a part of the health and wellbeing programme run by the company.

"The whole field of alternatives is a very strongly growing sector of the market and an exciting area to be working in."

She says the general managership of Blackmores is a job that suits her perfectly, because it's an area she has always had an empathy with.

The job came up when she was looking for new challenges.

For the past three years she has been chief executive of the national business mentoring service Business in the Community.

Over that time she has turned the organisation around, boosting its services 150 per cent and increasing its patrons from 30 to 170 of New Zealand's top businesses.

She will remain as a director of the Business in the Community.

Before that, she worked as marketing and sales manager for Hubbard Foods. She also managed export marketing for Bay of Plenty-based Taura Natural Foods, after her return from 13 years overseas.