President’s Award Profile: Professor George Lewith

In memory of Professor George Lewith – for outstanding contribution to the integrated healthcare

A qualified physician and Professor of Health Research, the late Professor George Lewith was the first doctor in England to receive specialist training in Complementary Medicine. Between 1980 and 2010, he set up and partnered the largest practice of integrated medicine in the UK, with NHS contracts in both Southampton and London. In an obituary published in British Medical Journal, it was commented that, ‘George gained much pleasure from seeing and treating patients and was passionate about treating them as a whole, with great emphasis on holistic care. Thousands of patients feel indebted to George for the compassionate, often life changing, treatment they received.’

Alongside being a practitioner of acupuncture, nutritional and herbal medicine and homeopathy techniques up until 2011, he was also a founder member and trustee of the Research Council for Complementary Medicine in 1982. He also established the Complementary and Integrated Medicine Research Unit at the University of Southampton in 1995, and founded the annual conference on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Strategies, Training, Research and New Developments – or CAMSTRAND, for short. He was a prominent researcher in the CAM field, and passionate about the importance of building the scientific evidence base for complementary medicine. Indeed, he had more than 350 peer review papers published, and raised more than £5 million in research funding – a huge accomplishment, by anyone’s standards.