Michael Dixon (doctor)

Michael David Dixon, CVO, OBE, FRCGP, FRCP (Hon) (born 12 May 1952)[1] is an English general practitioner and current Head of the Royal Medical Household.

Past ministerial appointments include Chair of the NHS LifeCheck Board and Practice Based Commissioning Advisor to Lord Darzi.

Reviewing the book, David Short, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Aberdeen writes: the authors urge doctors to move beyond the idea of the body as a machine.

[16]Dixon describes his approach to medicine in the BBC Radio 4 programme Healthy Visions,[17] which especially focuses on prevention and looking at the whole lives of patients.

Placebo research and psychoneuroimmunology are beginning to clarify a role in which caring is no longer an act of compassion or indulgence but has everything to do with curing or in the preferred modern term 'effectiveness'.

"[25] Ernst had previously been sympathetic to building a bridge between complementary and mainstream medicine, co-writing an article with Michael Dixon in 1997 on the benefits of such an approach.

[26] Ernst and Dixon wrote that: missed diagnoses by complementary therapists giving patients long term treatments are often cited but in the experience of one of the authors (MD) are extremely rare.

A patient was recently referred back to her general practitioner by an osteopath, who was questioning, as it turned out quite correctly, whether her pain was caused by metastates.

Good communication between general practitioner and complementary therapist can reduce conflicts and contradictions, which otherwise have the potential to put orthodox medicine and complementary therapy in an either/or situation.In December 2023, it was reported that Dixon had been appointed by Charles III as the Head of the Royal Medical Household a year previously in 2022, a decision which was criticised by campaigners against alternative medicine.