The Sky Fell In - latest from Tony Burfield on new UK regulations

[Guest guest]

The Sky Fell In.

Part of the sky fell in over the weekend. The UK's Times newspaper ran a

2-page story (see Times OnLine

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3134337.ece)

describing how the new Natural Healthcare Council modelled along the

lines of the General Medical Council, (GMC) will regulate aromatherapy,

reflexology, massage, nutrition, shiaztzu, reiki, naturopathy, yoga,

homeopathy, cranial osteopathy & the & Bowen techniques in the

UK. Nigel Hawles, the health editor for the Times, described the move as

a success for the Prince of Wales. I believe, on the other hand, that it

will be an unmitigated disaster for CAM.

What is the real motivation behind this? Its all about money & control.

The pharmaceutical trade has for a long time looked with envy at the

£130 million per year turnover generated by Complementary Alternative

Medicine (CAM), which is expected to rise to £200 million within four

years (Hawkes 2007) and its storm troopers have sought to kick

complementary alternative medicine in the head, via adverse media

coverage, at every possible opportunity. The threat posed is that the

rise of complementary therapies and the popular use of natural products

such as tea tree oil, ginseng, valerian etc., diverts attention from

convention medicine & the potential income from conventional synthetic

drug sales. Therefore any negative utterance by some academic 'expert'

(who those of us within CAM have generally never heard of) knocking

aromatherapy, herbal medicine, homeopathy etc. is faithfully reported by

various lightweight science reporters who work for the supposedly

independent quality UK newspapers such as the Guardian, the Independent

or the Observer. Cropwatch has been puzzled as to why our rebuttals of

the shallow, non-investigative & biased reporting has never been

featured in the letters pages of these organs. We don't have to look far

for an answer.

Its down to sinister lobbying organisations and their many sympathisers,

such as Sense About Science (hilariously described as 'a charity' by

obedient newspaper hacks) who are thought to be indirectly financed by

the pharmaceutical & chemical organisations & trades, and who exert

their considerable influence in distorting media science reporting,

defending GM products and. promoting an anti-environmentalist stance -

for example dismissing industrial pollution effects in terms of false

illness beliefs, arguing against organic food & vitamin supplements,

alternative medicine and so on.. For the real low-down on Sense About

Science (SAS), see the LobbyWatch website at

http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=151, or 's free

downloadable E-book: /Cultural Dwarfs & Junk Journalism/. One of SAS's

more chilling beliefs is that public discussion of scientific matters &

their ethics should be discouraged and legitimate arguments trivialised

or dismissed as fantasy, since the SAS view is the only valid one.

The Corporate Science supporter Ben Goldacre, who runs a 'Bad Science'

column in the Guardian which exercises a vendetta against various CAM

professions such as homeopathy & nutrition, is under the Guardian's

editorship protection, such that counterattacks to some of his

nonsensical ramblings never see the light of day. Goldacre, who

professes to be a mere hospital medic, whilst being quick to criticise

CAM, refuses to comment on his own profession's lamentable failings

(such as the abysmal statistics surrounding the failure of MD's to

correctly diagnose & prescribe the appropriate treatment for a given

patient's ills, the hundreds of thousands of patients who die or who's

health is severely adversely affected by the unwanted side-effects of

prescribed pharmaceuticals, or the hilarious but thorough reporting of

an extensive study by the Union of Concerned Scientists that following a

course of conventional drug treatment appears to statistically increase

the chances of shortening your life, not to mention the serious chances

of dying or losing limbs from hospital acquired infections!).

So why is Cropwatch opposed to the Natural Healthcare Council regulating

CAM? The Nigel Hawkes article suggests regulation is needed partly

because of high-profile cases where therapists have reportedly attacked

clients. This argument is clearly absolute nonsense -- the National

Health Service has always represented much more of a risk. For example

here in the UK, an inquiry started in 2000 decided that the medical

practitioner Dr Harold Shipman allegedly killed up to 250 of his

patients, some 218 of whom have been subsequently identified. Health

care authorities subsequently carried out heavy modifications to medical

practice to increase patient protection, but this move was merely

'shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted'.

As it is, regulation has all but destroyed the perfumery trade, &

Cropwatch spends most of its spare time fighting the absurdities of the

EU regulation outfall, and UK/Canadian/US National legislation that

concerns natural aromatic & medicinal products. Within the EU in the

cosmetics/essential oils sector, a bunch of Brussels lawyers with no

scientific knowledge are advised by so-called 'expert' committees

(themselves a bunch of academics with no trade experience) who rely on

big industry to provide scientific evidence on ingredient safety & other

regulatory matters. Of course big industry biases furnished safety

evidence to 'expert' committees towards to their Corporate interests,

and they employ and finance toxicologists to support their

hyperbureaucratic policies, which are themselves so complex, that they

profoundly disadvantage all of the less powerful competition with less

available technical manpower resources. A similar state of affairs

exists in Biocides regulation, where EU Directives are completely

written around the interests of the chemical industry, making it

virtually impossible cost-wise for small natural biocides with their

small financial resources producers to sell their relatively safer

products in Europe. It is a running open sore.

If the Natural Healthcare Council were to fully regulate all the CAM

areas mentioned in the first paragraph, it would require a complete

college-full of multi-disciplinary experts to administer the eleven or

so areas mentioned. It will be very interesting to see who they put up

to do this - we are promised eight of these regulators, who we learn

elsewhere will be probably lay people under the chairmanship of Dame

Joan Higgins.. What it probably would mean, is that those who passionate

about CAM are going to have to spend much of their time, unpaid &

unrewarded, teaching the regulators (and no doubt their " expert "

advsiers) how to do their job properly. If previous patterns are

repeated, the regulators will make inappropriate decisions based on

biased evidence proffered by those with hidden agendas, which the rest

of us will have to spend years undoing. Although Cropwatch has made some

unacknowledged headway in doing exactly this in other areas (cosmetics,

biocides), it is extremely dispiriting the think that there is

potentially much more to take on here as well.

First indications are that joining the proposed scheme will be

voluntary, eventually to be obligatory. The Council will (initially)

only have powers to strike off errant or incompetent therapists, or to

set minimum standards for practitioners. This latter prospect is, in

itself, most intriguing. Within aromatherapy, the low educational entry

requirements & abysmal course standards set in UK colleges are a

national joke, so setting minimum standards for practitioners will

presumably be a great source of material for satirical magazines such as

/Private Eye/. The profession is starved of finance, so no substantial

evidence-based aromatherapy data-base exists as such - anything that

does exist is likely to consist of published (so-called) aromatherapy

studies by non-practising academics, rather than tapping the massive

collective experience of everyday practitioners. Aromatherapy trade &

academic magazines are owned by aromatherapists, their chums, &

aromatherapy supply sellers - who profit from promoting their own

businesses within the magazines.

But of course it is perfectly possible to be a fantastic massage

therapist, aromatherapist etc., without having the dubious benefit of

attending some badly-taught aromatherapy course and getting the duly

signed piece of paper at the finish, and/or having to be obligatorily

registered with and represented by some professional aromatherapy

organisation or another. Perhaps this consideration should be the first

lesson for the potential regulators of the National Healthcare Trust. Or

perhaps, as in France, where aromatherapy has been legally designated as

a 'sect' (in spite of the fact that now according to some with national

pride, aromatherapy was invented in France), it may have to go

underground for a while to survive. In any case the freer CAM is from

regulation the better.

Sure, these professions have an element of scientific content, but

basically they are a folk-art, sympathetic to concepts of spirituality &

energy flow, and they need to be severely left alone, and they are doing

just fine from receiving no attention whatsoever, thanks, from a UK

government obsessed with control. Finally, if you have any doubts about

how a GMC-styled regulatory body might eventually end up in regulating

the CAM profession, have a look at s's account (again in

/Cultural Dwarfs & Junk Journalism/) on how the GMC and some of the

major players have dealt with Dr Wakefield. Wakefield, you will

remember dared to raise issues about the safety of the MMR vaccine and

possible links with autism, and who is currently involved in GMC a

fitness to practice hearing.

Tony Burfield.

P.S. Please pray with us that Prof. Edvard Ernst is not promoted to a

position of adviser or authority within the National Healthcare Council.

Ernst is a Corporate Science sympathiser who is working undercover as

Director of Complementary Medicine at Exeter University, & whose sole

purpose seems to be to rip the soul out of CAM, armed only with a

Corporate Science device called " the meta-analysis " . Ernst's stature &

reputation is such that it has even over-awed normally sensible

Herbalgram staff who worship & reproduce his every utterance, & who

apparently haven't noticed that now HE'S WORKING FOR THE OPPOSITION.

Wake up!

--

Sincerely, Anya

Anya's Garden http://AnyasGarden.com - perfumes, aromatics, classes,

consultation

Natural Perfumers Guild http://NaturalPerfumersGuild.com

1400 member Natural Perfumery group -

/

[Guest guest]

>

>The profession is starved of finance, so no substantial

evidence-based aromatherapy data-base exists as such - anything that

does exist is likely to consist of published (so-called) aromatherapy

studies by non-practising academics, rather than tapping the massive

collective experience of everyday practitioners. Aromatherapy trade &

academic magazines are owned by aromatherapists, their chums, &

aromatherapy supply sellers - who profit from promoting their own

businesses within the magazines.

Hi Anya and all,

This topic is so extensive--and so appalling--that should I have

chosen to comment on every point made, my reply should have been

twice as long as the original report, but only marginally valuable.

Be that as it may, however, Anya's statements, above, drew my

especial attention.

I work at a university library, in the periodicals section. We do

not carry any alternative health care journals, but we do carry all

the main medical and pharmacological journals such as Lancet, JAMA,

Nursing, and dozens of others. In every issue of every journal that

I have seen--and I have seen most of them--the pages are filled with

ads from the pharmaceutical and the medical technology & supply

companies.

Many of the journals are either owned or managed by Big Pharma.

Interlocking boards of directors, not to mention employees of Big

Pharma woring as editors and peer reviewers, make these highly

respected journals highly suspect. Unfortunately, the general public

has no idea who actually controls what is printed in these

publications; in many cases, members of the medical profession are

unaware that they are receiving biased and unscientific information.

In many cases, the information is not only unscientific, it is

completely unsupported.

Given this situation among established conventional medicine

journals, the description of aromatherapy and alternative medicine

journals does not seem so unprofessional. They are possibly more

scientific and less biased than the journals of conventional medicine.

Corporate profiteering drives the movement to " regulate " alternative

medical options, never doubt that. WIth the horrendous track record

of Big Pharma, especially in the US, it should be obvious that

patient well-being is *not* their goal. Alternative therapies work,

and the profits of corporate medicine have taken a hit. Clearly,

from the perspective of these profit-driven corporations, the only

way to correct this situation is to destroy the competition.

I am all for making a profit; don't misunderstand me. I simply

object, as do all of you, I know, to making those profits at the

expense of those whom the treatment is supposed to be helping. Big

Pharma and corporate medicine want their money, and no cost in human

suffering is too high. If alternative practitioners and their

suppliers are put out of business--and make no mistake, that *is* the

goal--there is no telling how many people may needlessly suffer and

die at the hands of profiteers in the name of medicine.

" First of all, do no harm. " Remember that harm is done to humans, to

businesses, to liberty, to science, and to the earth should Big

Pharma and corporate medicine win. We are entering the dark ages all

over again. We need to support Cropwatch and every other

organization out there that is fighting this effort to eliminate

alternative medicine.

~Becky