On 19 January, the new Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council finally saw the light of day. Its key function is "to enhance public protection by setting standards" in an area that even most experts find bewildering: alternative medicine. All good news then? Why am I not jubilant?
The history of the CNHC reads like that of a government body in a banana republic. Several years ago, the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health (PFIH) was given £900,000 from the Department of Health and previously £1 million from the King's Fund for setting up a regulatory framework for UK alternative practitioners. This is a lot of money for little work – and, crucially, it was given to entirely the wrong organisation. Imagine a lobby group - and that is precisely what the PFIH is - for the pharmaceutical industry, sponsored with taxpayers' money, to regulate the pharmaceutical industry. Barmy? Corrupt? Incompetent? You decide.
Anyway, PFIH somehow did manage to spend all of it and eventually came up with the CNHC. Regulation must be a good thing, we might argue. Let's get rid of the cowboys amongst the alternative practitioners! Let's raid the Chinese herbal shops run by mafia-like institutions making one illegal claim after the other and ripping off the gullible public! Sadly the CNHC will not achieve any of this.
As it turns out, only few alternative healthcare professions (massage therapists and nutritionists) have opted to join the CNHC, and even for them, membership is entirely voluntary. Imagine, a practitioner is found guilty of gross professional misconduct. She might get struck off, but is the public really protected from her? No, because she can easily and instantly continue to practice as a non-member anywhere she likes.
Is all this then just a farce, a waste of money and a exercise to please Prince Charles? No, I'm afraid it is worse than that. By including the term "Natural" in the council's name, the dangerous and already widespread myth is perpetuated that alternative therapies are all natural – and, by implication, harmless. There is nothing natural about serial dilution, as in homoeopathy, and there is not much safety (9 deaths since 1990) in chelation therapy, for instance.
Even worse, the CNHC, probably for the first time in the history of the NHS, firmly establishes double standards in British medicine. Doctors, nurses and other conventional healthcare professionals are obliged, through their codes of ethics, to adhere to the principles of evidence-based medicine; they must use treatments that demonstrably generate more good than harm for their patients. Not so the members of the CNHC! Until yesterday, their "Code of conduct, performance and ethics" was a closely guarded secret. When it was finally released, I was keen to find out what it says about evidence. The only statement I could find was the following: "You should only provide the treatment or advice if you believe this is appropriate".
So now it is official: evidence for conventional practitioners, while belief suffices for the alternative brigade. The MP Evan Harris was even less impressed with the new CNHC: "This register is an attempt to give legitimacy to a business model founded on deceiving the public with pseudo-scientific and misleading health claims". Say no more.
