Regulating quack medicine

It’s getting close to the end of term, so if you follow this blog you will get a link to a Mitchell and Webb comedy clip that neatly expresses my sentiments about ‘alternative’ medicine. This year the government has taken some first steps to regulate a business worth around £4.5 billion, with ‘treatments’ ranging from aromatherapy and energy channelling to yogic healing. Apparently 1 in 5 Britons has visited one of the 150,000 alternative therapists in the UK.

The new regulatory body will register practitioners who sign a code of conduct, take out insurance and provide evidence of some training, although the process is voluntary at present. Scientists and medics are nervous in case a state register of therapists will be taken as official endorsement of their treatments.

A bigger problem for the therapists is that consumer-protection laws (new in 2008) specifically forbid false claims that a product can cure a disease. This could make life difficult for purveyors of alternative medicine, which doesn’t really work (in a conventional sense) or has never been tested.

I hope these therapies might have worked for you or your friends and family. Astonishingly, even the NHS has funded some patients’ homeopathic treatments. See what Mitchell and Webb make of it all.