Alternative Therapy II: The Crackdown!

You have to love the English language - take words like compliment and complement, for example sound alike but have entirely different meanings.

To complement, from the Latin, complementum means to add to something. Whereas to compliment, also from complementum but via the Italian complimento means 'the fulfilment of the requirements of courtesy'.

If a man appreciates a woman's attire he may be paying her a compliment, but not a complement (and these days, thanks to fucking PC, he may even be accused of sexual harassment).

It is to this end that I may me introduce you to the "Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council" - which is one of those QUANGOs that has self-assumed the roll of overseeing the behaviour of alternative practitioners - quacks, in layman's speak. The website proudly (and predictably announces that):

"The CNHC has been developed with the help of complementary healthcare practitioners and with support from the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health. The Department of Health has consistently supported the CNHC throughout its start-up period and is committed to establishing the CNHC as the national voluntary regulator in the complementary healthcare field."

That would be this guy, HRH Prince Charles Windsor - the future monarch of England who desperately needs a proper job and whose no-expense spared education has failed to provide him with a modicum of cynicism or the power of critical thinking. Charles is dangerous - not like a terrorist is dangerous, but like an idiot with unlimited money, power and a cause is dangerous. Dubya was dangerous.

Charles lives in a protected environment where everything is done for him and he has access to the best medicines that science can produce and money can buy. Yet still he staunchly believes in and promotes some of the worst quackery imaginable.

So here we have an organisation (CNHC) funded and encouraged by a specialist in weird medicine which is going to regulate weirder "complementary" medicine.

Quack Complementary medicine should, by definition add something to a conventional treatment yet more often that not, practitioners give the impression or worse, advice, that theirs is an alternative of equal or better efficacy.

Many of these "remedies" have been around for thousands of years and have their bands of enthusiastic followers, yet they comprehensively fail to stand up to scientific scrutiny. Homoeopathy, reflexology, acupuncture, herbalism - the list is long but every single one has been examined at some point and found lacking.

There's some evidence that some traditional remedies have had active ingredients that might have treated disease (gout, for instance) and plants such as Deadly Nightshade (atropa belladonna) gives us atropine which is one of the most basic medicines (of its type) we posses. Evidence is the key here: and there's no evidence whatsoever that any of the quack treatments are any more effective than a good doctor and a large dose of a powerful placebo.

CNHC co-chairman Maggie Dunn doesn't understand irony of this statement appearing on the BBC:

"If that means that people who are not up to scratch are driven out of business, I will not cry for them "

Up to scratch? By whose measure? Are the CNHC going to introduce some system of exams to make sure these people can cure the ailments they claim to?

Well, errrr, No. This rather toothless organisation, says BBC Health Reporter, Nick Triggle, will:

"...not judge clinics on whether therapies are effective, but rather on whether they operate a professional and safe business."

So this government-sanctioned, voluntary register (it's £45 per annum to join) is going to ensure that quacks behave in a professional manner and somehow that's acceptable.

If anything, this lends some credence to these fuckwits and failed wannabe doctors - ensuring they carry insurance and pay membership to a toothless QUANGO? What fucking genius!

Health Minster, Ben Bradshaw MP, spoke warmly of the idea saying that member practitioners will offer the public:

"...the reassurance of knowing that they have had to meet minimum standards of qualification and that they have signed up to a rigorous code of conduct."

Of course, a doctorate in quackery is still in quackery! Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter's, Peninsula Medical School had reservations, telling the BBC:

"I have concerns that the regulator does not have mandatory powers and is not looking at the efficacy of these therapies."

As do I. As will proper medically trained doctors. My dictionary defines medicine thus:

"the science or practice of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease"

If complementary "treatments" do not diagnose or can be shown scientifically to treat or prevent disease, then they are not fucking medicines and do not deserve that title!

Quack! Over and out.