A Dark Day For Medicine in The UK
May 19th, 2009
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The UK, like most countries with a descent medical system, has regulations regarding what medications can be sold to consumers and what those medications can claim to do. This is naturally to protect the right of a consumer to purchase a legitimate product without benign defrauded by false or misleading statements and to use drugs and medicines with an accurate understanding of what they are and how they should be used. In the US, we’ve had similar laws since the Pure Food and Drug act of 1907.
Also like most other countries, homeopathic preparations could be sold in drug stores or other establishments, as these were not generally subject to the same kind of regulation as real medicines. Thus, unlike legitimate drugs, the homeopathic and “natural” preparations didn’t have to prove that their product worked at all, and were generally given free range to sell anything. However there was one thing that they could not do: They could not make the statement that their product was a fully approved drug or medication and indicated for a given condition with the promise of providing a given degree of symptom relief or treatment of the condition.
Thus, such products were limited to be sold as “supplements,” or in some other capacity that made them distinct from real medications. While this only does so much to help in combating fraud, at the very least, they were not elevated to the status of legitimate drugs and pharmaceuticals like aspirin, penicillin or baking soda.
Notice the use of the past-tense here…
Medicines regulator grants first ever licence to homeopathic remedy
The UK medicines regulator has granted its first licence to a homeopathic remedy under controversial new rules allowing complementary therapies to make medicinal claims.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has granted an arnica homeopathic product a licence for the relief of sprains or bruising.
Experts say that it contains zero active ingredients and condemned the decision as a “cynical mockery of evidence-based medicine”.
Nelsons Arnicare Arnica 30c pillules are the first product to be given a therapeutic indication via the Homeopathic National Rules Scheme, introduced in September 2006.
As opposed to conventional or herbal medicine, homeopathy is based on the principle that a substance that can make people ill can be diluted thousands of times to treat the symptoms it would otherwise create.
Manufacturers of homeopathic remedies were previously banned from listing the clinical conditions or “indications” that products might be used to treat, due to a lack of evidence that they work.
But under the new license granted by the MHRA, the label on a £5.30 packet of 84 pillules will now read: “A homeopathic medicinal product used within the homeopathic tradition for symptomatic relief of sprains, muscular aches and bruising or swelling after contusions.”
The homeopathic pillules are designed to be sucked or chewed and to be taken between meals.
Robert Wilson, chairman of Nelsons, said that the fact that therapeutic indications could be included on the packaging “not only opens the practice of homeopathy up to new users but also gives it added credibility as a safe and natural complement to conventional medicine”.
But Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, said there is no evidence that the product has any benefit over a placebo treatment.
“This is a huge rip-off and the label now makes false and misleading claims,” he said. “There is no biological plausibility for this to work — it makes a cynical mockery of evidence-based medicine.”
Nelsons, the largest manufacturer of natural healthcare products in Britain, also produces herbal tinctures for the Prince of Wales’s Duchy Originals brand, which Professor Ernst has also criticised as “outright quackery”.
Last week, the Advertising Standards Authority reprimanded the Duchy brand over its promotional materials, ruling that claims made about the effectiveness of the tinctures were misleading.
Well damn! What an absolutely stunning crock of bull! Essentially what they are doing here is approving a homeopathic preparation (which just plain does not work), to be labeled and sold right along side the verified and valid products that actually do work and can provide the verifiable proof of safety and effectiveness. The fact that it states it is homeopathic (in fine print) is really of no consolation. What is happening here is that the government body responsible for assuring that medications are safe and medically sound is giving a stamp of approval to a product which is nothing but a scam.
I won’t go into all the reasons homeopathy is invalid, but if you’re not versed on what homeopathy is, you can go here to learn more. Homeopathy has never been proven to be effective to any degree by any empirical data. Beyond that, it’s based on theory which is logically impossible. Just a few thought experiments will immediately show homeopathy is an illogical, impossible, paradoxical crock of bull. (for example, if you use less of a homeopathic product, does that make it stronger? If you dilute a homeopathic sleep aid does it become a better homeopathic sleep aid or does it become a homeopathic alertness aid?)
Thus, the entire system of regulation that allows the public to buy a product and know they’re not being scammed is compromised. No longer can the system, which was supposed to be objective, fair and trustworthy be trusted. This is not an issue of equality or freedom to sell a product, because selling a product with a false claim is theft by deception, and theft is never justified.
So how did this happen? The problem is that the UK has an especially strong homeopathic political lobby. Stronger than many other countries, and as such, the homeopathy movement actually makes up a fairly powerful political force. They’ve managed to turn a relatively simple issue (either a medicine works or it doesn’t) into a controversial one by obfuscation. By injecting irrelevant issues and statements like “people have a right to try alternatives” and “you can’t discriminate against us,” they have managed to play a game of politics and PR to make themselves seem like the victim, who needs to be accommodated and protected. They have some big names involved too, even Prince Charles, who champions homeopathy.
Thus this ridiculous legislation that is politics of the worst kind.
As an American, there’s not much I can do about this, other than point out how ridiculous and counter-productive this is. However, if you are a Brit, I urge you to oppose this kind of policy and to bring your opposition to the attention of your elected representatives at all level of government. Furthermore, if your respective member of parliament supported this, I’d recommend thinking long and hard about whether they deserve to be elected to another term in office.
(I don’t mean to tell you how to run your country or anything, but this is ridiculous)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Obfuscation, Paranormal, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 19th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
It’s just very sad that it has come to this. Any regulator that thinks that there is such a thing as alternative (as opposed to evidence-based) medicine, is anti-science and lives in a dream world with no connection to reality. More damning, they are engaging in the ultimate act of arrogance: to declare something true or untrue not because of reason or evidence, but only because they declare it so. What these bureaucrats need a good dose of humility, and that one way to get it is to admit that the universe is not about them, and that some people out there really know more than they do, as unpleasant a thought as this may be.
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May 20th, 2009 at 2:33 am
You don’t mean to tell us how to run the country? Well, somebody should, because this is a national disgrace, which in addition to the additional disgrace that NHS funds homeopathic hospitals. It is nothing but a political group that has sold themselves as being sympathetic to patients and helpful but it is all a scam. There is good reason to see this as a shame and pure stupidity. The process of licencing for medicine is based on proving that it is of medical value and this makes it meaningless.
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May 20th, 2009 at 3:37 am
I do not buy the argument that homeopathy is somehow an issue of “freedom” like “people should be free to sell and use homeopathy like any other product.” or whatever the argument is. ALL countries (except perhaps a few barely governed ones in the third world) have a regulatory agency that evaluates drugs and decides which ones can be sold and whether they need to be sold by prescription or OTC and what they need to carry for warnings or directions. The US has the FDA and all other countries have their equivalent because it is a necessity.
A product like a medicine can’t be sold with false pretense. It has to do what it says and it has to be safe or if it has dangers they need to be known and documented. This needs to be verified. It is something that requires scientific research and documentation and that is why you need an agency that can verify this and decide that the medication is valid. If you did not have this there would be no way to tell anything. You can’t wait until someone gets hurt because that would lead to chaos with the burden of proof being reduced. It is fine to put the burden of proof on the manufacturer.
This is the ONLY way to protect the public’s right to free and fair commerce because free commerce needs to be policed for fraud. Without this, there is no safety of property because fraud IS theft. Selling a bogus medical product is THEFT. I agree it is theft by deception. Even worse in medicine it goes beyond theft and can lead to criminal homicide.
If the reglatory agency decides it is okay to grant equal approval to unproven and non-useful meds and proven ones equally then said agency is no longer effective. This turns the agency useless. All the good that science based medicine and effective and fair regulation has done and all the progress of the last century is therefore undone.
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May 20th, 2009 at 7:44 am
There will be a lot of openings now for Parliamentary candidates. Maybe I should have a go. I certainly couldn’t do a worse job than this lot and I’d be cheaper too. And I could put a stop to travesties such as this.
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May 20th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Why doesn’t tap water cause miscarriages? After all, much sperm ends up in the toilet. The toilet water is extremely diluted during its journey back to the average home. Since sperm causes pregnancy, why doesn’t tap water “cure” it?
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May 20th, 2009 at 8:32 am
DV82XL said:
While homeopathy is of course a crock, do you think that the government should fund scientific tests on various traditional medicinal preparations? “Evidence-based” does not necessarily imply “will make big bucks for Big Pharma”, after all…
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May 20th, 2009 at 8:39 am
I’m drafting a letter to my MP over this outrage. I just want to check my facts. Homeopathic products (I will not refer to them as remedies) are diluted to what they call “30C”. That’s one in a hundred done 30 times IIRC. So that means that in total, a homeopathic product has been diluted by a factor of 10^60?
Also, what would be an approximate starting concentration? I’m trying to demonstrate the absurdity of it all through a worked example starting with a 2M solution.
Has any homeopath tried to cure emphysema with homeopathic tar or lung cancer with homeopathic asbestos or autism with homeopathic MMR (hee hee! I bet most homeopathic fans are anti-MMR nutters too).
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May 20th, 2009 at 8:53 am
George Carty said:
“Big Pharma” has had no qualms about mining traditional medicine for new products without any help from government. The accusation that modern pharmacology stands aloof in this regard is just plain wrong. Most of the common traditional medicinal preparations and procedures have been looked at scientifically at one point in the recent past, and most have been found wanting.
I can recall in the 70’s a team from the West going to China with great hoopla during the ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ era to examine the use of acupuncture in Chinese hospitals for example. It was funny because when they got back the poor doctors were bending over backwards not to say they found that it was all a crock, while at the same time minimizing the possibility of insulting their hosts.
The charge of persecution, and failure to be open minded about CAM is a charge that ‘Alternative’ medicine is quick to make against the mainstream, but the truth is almost all of it has been looked at seriously and rejected as worthless. This is what makes this approval in the U.K. so outrageous, as it totally undermines the whole system that has in the past approved real medications with traditional roots.
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May 20th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Josh said:
Because homeopathy is bull****.
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May 20th, 2009 at 10:31 am
George Carty said:
The fact that something is ‘traditional’ does not mean it is not medically valid. When we hear of something being traditional it’s usually used as some justification for its use because it’s bull, but there are medications that are totally mainstream and we never think of as ‘traditional’ because they’re just thought of as normal medicines.
Examples:
Calcium carbonate and similar compounds have been used to relieve heartburn for centuries and now are sold as antacids.
Witch hazel was used by native americans and is the active ingredient in many topical products for skin irritation and hemorrhoid cremes.
Opiate pain killers came from the study of the opium poppy which had been used medicinally and as a recreational drug for a long time.
Distilled spirits were sometimes traditionally used on occasion to clean wounds even though nobody knew why it worked to prevent infection (they probably should have used it more often than they did) and today alcohol is sometimes used as a general purpose antiseptic.
Something only stays “alternative” if it doesn’t work. If it does it immediately becomes mainstream.
The fact that there’s no money in it for “big pharma” means nothing. Drug companies research one sector of medicine (profitable drugs) and are not the only game in town. There are private foundations and universities and government programs.
Researching traditional medicines or whatever is one thing, but homeopathy? It’s not even traditional. It was invented circa 1800 and never was part of wholesale medical practice and always fringe. Besides, homeopathy has been debunked so many hundreds of times, what’s the point? It’s a waste. It would be like sending a probe to the moon with only instruments on board only to determine if the moon is made of cheese and if so what kind. We know the moon is not made of cheese and that kind of mission would be idiotic and wasteful to mount.
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May 20th, 2009 at 10:47 am
(I don’t mean to tell you how to run your country or anything, but this is ridiculous)
I appreciate your trying to avoid coming off as being a foreigner lecturing at another country’s policies, but it’s not necessary here. I am not offended by criticism of this policy. I **am** offended by the policy itself. Like most governments, we get our share of bonehead policies, but this one is just especially fraudulent. Yes, it does come from a strong political and social lobby for homeopathy which paints itself as being helpful to the patient and the big bad government and pharmaceutical companies want to stop them.
I appreciate that this is listed here because this is an outrageously misguided measure that should be brought to the attention of the public for what it is. I am not very hopeful that it will be reversed any time in the near future given the climate, but it is worth trying and it will hopefully not be applied very often to these fraudulent preparations.
DV82XL said:
I do not know if this can be blamed entirely on the bureaucrats who run the agencies. The system has been shook up several times in the past few years. The current MHRA was established in 2003 I think. The politicians have been having a go at rearranging the system and regulations quite a bit.
In the case of homeopathic preparations being approved, I believe the hands of the regulators are more or less tied. The products are approved if they meet homeopathic standards and this is the letter of the law as Parliament has set it.
Therefore if a homeopathic product meets the requirements, brainless though they may be, then the regulators may not have much choice but to approve it.
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May 20th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
RBR, this policy is really silly, but I do like how the UK has taken a very cautious approach with GM food, so it’s not all bad for you.
Here in the US we spent the last eight years moving full speed towards a total Genetically modified food supply. But the Democrats at the state level are working towards some restrictions on GM foods, and hopefully we can use the UK as a model for national regulation.
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May 20th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Bruce said:
Maybe someday Bruce will make a reply that has some relevence to the topic. Or is this like homeopathy – the more diluted the better?
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May 20th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Bruce said:
Of course not all UK policies are bad. I’d say the vast majority of them are very good and purposeful and I don’t think the country is an example of bad government, even if the government makes some very bad decisions from time to time. I don’t think that excuses this. Of course it could be worse, but it could be better too.
Genetically modified food policy is not too bad and the major genetically engineered food crops have already in use for years. The approval system may not be perfect, but fungi resistant crops are in wide use and most of the crop types become avaliable here no more than a few years after full introduction elsewhere. There has not been a lot of domestic development here compared to the US or Japan, but maybe that will change.
There are of course the scare campaigns to get it banned or heavily restricted but I don’t see them working. People are mostly aware of the fact that they’ve been eating this food for a while. If you want an example of somewhere where the scare tactics have worked you could look at the Netherlands which has all but banned genetic engineered products. I’m sure this will change as they become more aware that they have shot themselves in the foot.
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May 20th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
well, I’m afraid UK is not alone. switzerland has recently decided that alternative medicine must be covered by obligatory health insurance:
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/internal_affairs/Biometric_passport_scrapes_through_at_ballot_box.html?siteSect=1511&sid=10708166&cKey=1242631051000&ty=st
if you read the document, which was the scientific “basis” of the referendum (pg 15-17, there is a summary in english) they are admitting that these “medicines” don’t work.
in my opinion thi is very sad. europe is the place where modern science was born, now it’s becoming the grave.
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May 20th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
sorry, the link to the “scientific ” paper is:
http://www.siamc.ch/uploads/files/Schlussbericht_PEK.pdf
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May 20th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Bruce said:
Beyond the obvious fact that GM food is not bad just because it is GM, whereas a homeopathic product is worthless because in reality nothing is there, the fact remains that all of the anti GM rules everywhere in the E.U. are essentially protectionism in nature. They are less concerned about the safety of foodstuffs as they are with protecting internal markets for their farmers. While this is stupid, it is nevertheless founded on some logic, approving a homeopathic product, know to be devoid of any medicinal content is criminally negligent.
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May 20th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Good lord. And I thought DSHEA was a travesty…..
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May 20th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
DV82XL said:
Many of the pieces of legislation (arguably most) are based on some form of protectionism of producers, but I find this still offensive for a number of reasons. Not the least of these is the fact that they are sold as a safety issue and under the guise of Gm crops being bad for the enviornment or unhealthy. This is a lie. Good legislation should be supported for its own reasons and if you have to resort to lies to get it passed then there’s a problem with it. Also, it creates unnecessary fear of a useful technology.
The other thing is that you really can’t fight something like this. It might be to your detriment in the short term but trying to keep a new technology of value down and put the genie back in the bottle is a losing proposition. Any technology which has significant worth will be adopted eventually and trying to stop it only assures you’re the last one to benefit from it.
One issue I have with GM crops (which is in no way related to the actual science of it or the end product) is that they are increasingly trying to get protection for it under things like the DMCA and basically get unlimited rights to restrict a developed product for an unlimited period of time. Methods for genetically modifying plants, IMHO, should be protected by patent law and not general purpose intellectual property law. Patent law is designed for intellectual property related to R&D and technical developments.
A patent is for a limited period of time (depending on the country) usually less than 20 years. This is enough time to make a fair amount of money on a product but insures that you don’t get control of it forever. Since the patent applies from the products development (Not the final market approval) this would even less for something like GM crops. Also, patent law is pretty good about restricting claims to a narrow technical method. You can’t stop others from doing the same thing you do by developing an alternate approach to the same end. Also, it only gives you the right to the production of the product and does not stop others from using your product in a new manner (such as aftermarket modifications).
But that’s another issue entirely. Copyright laws have been far overextended into technical matters that they really should not apply to. We need a good overhaul of intelectual property law to cut back on missuse of product rights.
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May 21st, 2009 at 2:58 am
I think I might have been confused. I thought Bruce was saying that the UK’s been pretty good about not caving to the anti-genetics wackos that have scared enough people in Swizerland and the Netherlands and some other places to get restrictive laws. As I re-read it it seems like he is saying that the amount of anti-genetic groups here is a good thing and that there has been ideas of major restrictions is a good thing?
I don’t think there will be any huge restriction here because the cat is out of the bag. I do not think other countries will be able to get away with fear-based bans either. Even Germany, which is normally ripe for extremism from their Green Party has not seen national restrictions gain huge support. Germany is a big food exporter and enough realize they won’t be competitive if they don’t embrace this.
There was some idiot from Scottland who went to Africa with a big group to try to convince the African governments not to accept food aid that was not guaranteed GM free. One or two countries agreed it was ‘too dangerous’ and bad for health, apparently thinking it would be destructive to everything. They refused a large shipment of food aid which was already in transit as an end product for famine relief. In my opinion, those people should be in front of a human rights crimes tribunal.
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May 31st, 2009 at 10:50 am
What do you call a house filled with idiots constantly bickering over which group of idiots are the dumber lot?
Parliament.
Just more proof that the country is run by nitwits. What an embarrassment! Homeopathy given an official stamp of approval as a medically valid treatment. I thought I’d never see the day.
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June 9th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
The labeling for the first homeopathic product to get a licence from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) should be illegal, because they breach Unfair Trading regulations, argues a senior scientist today.
In a letter published in this week’s BMJ, Professor David Colquhoun from University College London says the MHRA “has made a mockery of its own aims” by allowing Arnica 30C pills to be labeled “a homeopathic medicinal product used with the homeopathic tradition for the symptomatic relief of sprains, muscular aches, and bruising or swelling after contusions.”
This label should be illegal, he says, because the pills contain no trace of the ingredient on the label, but this deceit has been allowed through a legal loophole for a long time now. He points out that if you sold strawberry jam that contained not a trace of strawberry you’d be in trouble.
But he can see no such loophole that allows manufacturers of Arnica 30C to evade the consumer protection laws which ban “falsely claiming that a product is able to cure illnesses” and which apply to the way that “the average consumer” will interpret the label.
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December 13th, 2010 at 5:51 am
Ta-Ra! administrator can I use a little of the sentence from that post if I return a hyperlink back to your web site ?
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