Brits flying to Spain for Therapy : Professional Health Blog

Brits flying to Spain for Therapy

May 26, 2007 at 12:43 am · Filed under Alternative

A chat on the Med: better than a pill

Free Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Brits in Spain. Last year over 29 million people in the UK were prescribed mood-enhancing drugs such as Prozac and Zoloft, costing the NHS more than £400 million, even though experts have warned that these drugs are not the best long-term solution, since they treat the symptoms rather than the cause.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is now becoming the treatment of choice for people suffering from a whole range of problems including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, eating disorders and OCD, but because of a serious shortage of trained CBT therapists and waiting lists of up to 18 months, 9 out of 10 doctors have been forced to continue prescribing “happy pills”.

Celebrities like Cameron Diaz, who suffers from panic attacks and David Beckham, who suffers from OCD, don’t have the problem of waiting to see an NHS therapist. They have the luxury of being able to see a private therapist immediately in one of the 5 star clinics in London or LA.

In southern Spain, the Marbella / Puerto Banus area has always been associated with cosmetic surgery and dentistry available only to those who can afford to pay the price, but now many working class Brits are joining the celebrities by taking a budget Internet-booked flight from UK provincial airports into Malaga, in order to visit a clinic that offers free initial sessions in CBT. The British–run clinic in Fuengirola (between Malaga and Marbella) was used to seeing Brits flying over for stopping smoking therapy, but now they are arriving with a whole shopping list of problems.

With Malaga being just a little over 2 hours flying time from the UK, and midweek flights being relatively inexpensive, the word has spread. It is believed that the idea of patients visiting the clinic in Spain may have originated from frustrated GP’s as a last resort, given that more than one third of all primary care trusts in the UK are struggling to cope with the backlog of people who are desperate for treatments that include counselling and cognitive therapy.

This new influx of Brits to the Costa del Sol brings an interesting slant to the term “Health Tourists”