A plethora of recent news stories have highlighted a growing problem with the regulation of alternative medicine in Britain. Together they reveal an industry that is increasingly out of control in the absence of any coherent government policy. The consequences are bad for the public, and bad for alternative medicine practitioners themselves.
The British Homeopathic Association was criticised for giving misleading evidence to parliament, homeopathy was savaged by a select committee report and the 10:23 campaign proved beyond doubt that "there's nothing in it" by staging mass overdoses.
Police began an investigation into alleged fraud at a charity founded by Prince Charles, the Foundation for Integrated Health.
In many cases, the wounds are self-inflicted. Many questioned the BCA's wisdom in pursuing Singh through the courts, but perhaps a more pertinent question for chiropractors is what on earth a professional body was doing spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of members' fees protecting its own interests?
The consequences haven't stopped there. A quirk of the General Chiropractic Council's rules means that chiropractors who make claims that are incompatible with previous Advertising Standards Authority rulings must be investigated by the regulator. It's a curiously ad hoc approach to regulation, and it has been exploited by sceptics to the extent that one in four chiropractors are now being investigated by the council for allegedly making misleading claims to the public
Similar stories of regulatory strife can be found across the industry, with an alphabet soup of regulators and professional bodies – often in direct competition with each other – attempting to enforce some sort of order. The results range from apathy to the sort of pitched battles raging in homeopathy. Regulators themselves are running amok, with the Society of Homeopaths and Homeopathy Action Trust continuing to fund the homeopathic treatment of Aids in Africa.
Conventional medical regulators aren't free of this confusion either. I recently asked the General Medical Council about homeopathy. They told me that doctors "must provide effective treatments based on the best available evidence" (they declined to comment on the evidence for homeopathy), and yet a complaint by Merseyside Skeptics about a GP advocating homeopathy on the news was met with the reply that they "do not require doctors to use only evidence-based treatments".
Stepping into the middle of all this mess is a new government-backed regulatory organisation, the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC), or "OfQuack" as it was inevitably dubbed by critics, set up by Prince Charles' Foundation for Integrated Health with an additional grant from the Department of Health.
The Department of Health insists that the charity and council are now completely separate organisations. But how a charity that lobbies on behalf of the alternative medicine industry came to be funded by the government to set up a regulator for the very same industry is unclear, because meetings between Prince Charles and the Secretary of State for Health, Andy Burnham, are among the most closely guarded secrets in government. They're probably filed in a basement somewhere between UFO sightings and the real reason for the big cloud of volcanic ash sitting over the country.
The government's response to a Freedom of Information request I submitted read like something out of Yes Minister:
"The Department neither confirms nor denies that it holds information falling within the description specified in your request ... This should not be taken as an indication that the information you requested is or is not held by the Department ... To be clear, the Department is not neither confirming nor denying whether the Secretary of State met with The Prince of Wales ... The Department is neither confirming nor denying whether it holds any information within the specific terms of your request."
The CNHC launched with a target of registering 10,000 practitioners across a variety of disciplines. Almost immediately it became apparent that it would not attract enough members, and more than a year later a little over 2,000 practitioners have signed up, 8,000 short of the number required for the council to be self-financing, as revealed in a recent public meeting.
Part of the reason for this shortfall has been explained as "inaccurate business information" due to a lack of research into the industry – leading to the overestimate of its scale – but a bigger problem is the amount of hostility the council faces from the alternative medicine community. Suggestions from Andy Burnham that herbal medicine practitioners be brought under the CNHC umbrella have not been received well, while homeopathy groups have pretty much rejected the idea outright.
With a new government set to assume power and all parties likely to take a hard look at budgets and quangos, the future of the CNHC is far from certain. And even it it were, the fact remains that the council is a voluntary register, and one that is not required to scrutinise the medical claims made by its members.
It is thus about as powerful as, well, most of the medicine it regulates.
Why is there a need for an alternative medicine regulator in the first place? This question has never been answered satisfactorily. Either a product is a medicine, in which case it should be allowed to make health claims and be regulated as a medicine by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), or it is not, in which case it shouldn't be allowed to make health claims and should be regulated in the same way as, say, a packet of Tic-Tacs.
Allowing this bizarre pseudo-regulation to continue risks legitimising a whole range of bogus medical practices.
