Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

As well as, in our opinion, inadequately policing its own ranks, it seems that the Society of Homeopaths encourages bad practice. It appears to promote misleading, inaccurate and potentially dangerous ideas. In 2007, on World AIDS Day, the Society organized an HIV/AIDS Symposium in London. A spokeswoman for the Society claimed that the conference was about alleviating the symptoms of AIDS. In fact, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that homeopathy can ease AIDS symptoms. Worse still, the conference discussed far more ambitious claims. The speakers were Hilary Faircloch, a homeopath who already works with HIV patients in Botswana; Jonathan Stallick, author of a book entitled AIDS: the homeopathic challenge; and Harry van der Zee, who believes that ‘the AIDS epidemic can be called to a halt, and homeopaths are the ones to do it’. The last thing that HIV/AIDS sufferers need is false hope and barmy remedies.

9 Governments and regulators

In his book Bad Medicine, the historian David Wootton writes, ‘For 2,400 years patients believed that doctors were doing them good; for 2,300 years they were wrong.’ In other words, for most of our history, most medical treatments have failed to treat most of our diseases effectively. In fact, most of the doctors from previous centuries harmed rather than healed our ancestors.

The turning point came with the arrival of scientific thinking, the clinical trial and government regulation to protect vulnerable patients from harm — both physical and financial. The snake-oil salesmen were gradually driven out of business and mainstream medicine was forced to show that its treatments were both safe and effective before they could be employed.

In some instances, it required tragic events in order to bring about regulation. Or, as Michael R. Harris, historian of pharmacy at the Smithsonian Institution, put it, ‘The story of drug regulation is built of tombstones.’ For example, in 1937, a Tennessee-based pharmaceutical company called S. E. Massengill Co. used diethylene glycol as a solvent in the production of a new antibiotic called Elixir Sulfanilamide. There were no regulations requiring pre-market safety testing, so the company only became aware that the solvent was toxic when patients began to report serious side-effects. Typically, children were taking the elixir for a throat infection and were then suffering kidney failure and going into convulsions. The error caused over 100 fatalities, including the death of the company’s chemist, Harold Watkins, who committed suicide when the scandal emerged. The following year American legislators passed the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which allowed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to demand proof that new drugs were safe before going on sale. Regulations were still inadequate in many other parts of the world, but the Thalidomide tragedy of the 1960s compelled many other governments to bring in legislation. The UK Medicines Act of 1968, for instance, was a direct consequence of the Thalidomide disaster.

Alternative medicine, however, seems to have sidestepped these regulations. Buzzwords such as ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’ have allowed them to carry on largely unhindered in a parallel universe that is oblivious to safety issues. For example, in most countries, herbal remedies and other supplements can be marketed without rigorous proof of safety. The burden of proof is reversed: it is not the manufacturer who has to demonstrate that his product is harmless, but it is the regulator who has to prove that the product is harmful — only then can it be withdrawn from the market. This obviously is haphazard, as there are far too many products, so regulators react only when problems emerge. This is much like drug regulation before Thalidomide: a disaster (or several) waiting to happen.

Similarly, alternative practitioners tend to be un-or under-regulated. There are, of course, considerable national differences, but in general alternative practitioners do not require any in-depth medical training or experience. Indeed, literally anyone reading this text in Britain could call themselves a homeopath, a naturopath, a herbalist, an aromatherapist, an acupuncturist, a reflexologist or an iridologist. You might have no training in conventional or alternative medicine, yet nobody could stop you nailing a sign to your front door and placing an advertisement in your local newspaper. It goes without saying that this situation is less than satisfactory. Serious diagnoses can be missed, conditions that never existed can be diagnosed, ineffective or harmful treatments can be applied, wrong or dangerous advice can be issued, and patients can be ripped off — and all this without adequate control or recourse.