I think it is a terrible shame that no homeopaths are responding to your posts. There is no question that ’something must be done’ but if that something is legislative in nature, and the arguments for this are compelling, then in the interests of fairness homeopaths must be engaged. If they refuse to take part in this debate then they will be disenfranchised by default. In an open democracy that is a appalling but easily avoidable fate.

External regulation may be the only answer as homeopaths, especially, are systematically incompetent. Their paricular beliefs about science, evidence and medicine mean they are incapable of apprasing their own competence and practice and see themselves as being a complete alternative to conventional medicine. Other disciplines do not hold this dual strand of complete delusion and utter arrogance to the same degree, from what I see.

The FSA example is a good one. A financial advisor cannot make a initial disclosure to say that they are acting in the capacity as ‘execution only’ and then offer advice on what mortgage to buy. This is not limiting their freedom of speech, but ensuring their actions are transparent and consistent. I see no problem with insisting that alternative medicine practitioners act consistently with their disclosures. The alternative might be top make non-medically qualified alternative medicine practices illegal – as say, NMQP Homeopaths are in France. Is that a curtailment of freedom of speech?

This is all good stuff (and David Colquhoun’s blog is as funny and as apt as ever), but I have a nagging worry about one of your recommended strictures, namely your idea that ‘any attempt to undermine this disclosure or denigrate or undermine a person’s GP or their advice would be an offense.’

You are straying into some rather difficult territory, as a) there are more than a few medical practitioners working at distinctly sub-optimal levels of competence, and b) there are legitimate concerns about the validity of some of the current medical / industrial norms. Ask any research cardiologist about statins, for example.

I believe that your suggestion would stifle (criminalise) an area of debate which, while not as well controlled as occurs in the scientific literature or among the scientific community at large, is still potentially valuable in that it can eventually lead to more formal investigations.

Criminalising the expression of views that you disagree with is not, I would submit, a politically healthy direction to go down. Let’s not create a medical version of Sharia.

Maybe we could be more specific, and more case-sensitive. If you were to make it an offence to deliberately mis-represent science – medical or otherwise – with the aim of profiting thereby, that, I think, would be the basis of a more reasonable form of legal control.

All the best.

its clearly ‘quackers’ to have “a lay person…not able to judge the scientific validity of these therapies” (as Prof Higgins says about herself) to head up an organisation that the public will consider, er, will ‘judge the scientific validity of these therapies’.
More importantly, to judge the questionable actions of a therapist against expected practice based on the “scientific validity” of their chosen woo subject.

There again, perhaps this should be a salutatory warning to the public about just how relaxed the alt.health industry and its self-regulatory (or should that be self-congratulatory?) bodies are when comes to exploiting the vulnerable against a backdrop of ‘pic’n'mix’ practices designed to ensure the maximum placebo response for optimum income generation.

This is worse than letting the lunatics run the asylum – at least they know the layout of the place. Indeed, it’s akin to pill-pushing vitamin entrepreneurs assuming control of your childs education.

Hang on, thats happened already, hasn’t it?

Precedent set. Sanity lost.