This is a tragic, not least for the convicted parents. A nine month old baby died unnecessarily in the most horrific way because of her parent’s belief in the superiority and power of homeopathic sugar pills. Gloria suffered from severe eczema where the sores became severely infected. She constantly cried in pain and her skin became broken and oozing with fluid. She became malnourished and died.

This case has very important implications for those who are seeking better ways to regulate the so-called ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ (CAM) sector here in the UK. Understanding the nature of this tragedy will highlight the shortcomings of the approaches being taken by the government.

The parents of baby Gloria Thomas have been branded “cruel”, “arrogant” and “irresponsible”. The couple wept in the dock and it is easy to understand why. It is not just the loss of their daughter, or their impending incarceration, but almost undoubtedly their complete failure to understand what has happened to them.

This gulf may be difficult to grasp by those who do not understand the nature of homeopathy and see it just as a natural and safe complementary medicine. It is nothing of the sort. Whilst its pills are completely safe (they are just sugar pills), the homeopathic belief system is quite dangerous. Homeopathy does not define itself as complementary. It is not designed to assist treatments by real medicine. Homeopathy defines itself as ‘a compete system of medicine’ in its own right and, importantly, it defines itself in conflicting opposition to what homeopaths call ‘allopathy’ – or mainstream medicine. Homeopathy is strictly alternative.

The founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, was keen to discover the universal laws of health and to create general and complete principles of healing. Homeopathy is the result. Indeed, Hahnemann saw chronic disease as actually being caused by other forms of non-homeopathic treatment and that deviations from the strict homeopathic doctrines as being disastrous for health. The Society of Homeopaths describe homeopathy on the front page of their site as a “complete system of medicine”. It describes how homeopathy can treat “all a patients symptoms”. This is a system that is not presented as a complement to other therapies, but a full system in its own right.

These belief systems persist for many interesting reasons. In two hundred years, the homeopathic principles have not been underpinned with an evidence base of any reliable sort. Worse, the principles have been shown to be in direct contradiction with well established principles of physics and chemistry. Homeopathy is magical in its nature, not scientific. The beliefs persist not because of their veracity but because they are taught within a cult-like atmosphere. The homeopath, Michael Bridger writes that,

The unwritten rule is not to be critical or try to define. No one has to publicly burn the books; you simply deify the inane and render critical thought unfashionable. Politically, this is a sophisticated form of authoritarianism; medically and clinically, it is the seeds of psychosis.

Recently, another homeopath has commented on Gimpy’s blog about the cult like nature of homeopathy. She describes it as a ‘pyramid scheme’, and like all successful pyramid schemes you need to ‘sell the dream.’ In her words, “We alone care about health – everyone else (Big Pharma, allopaths, EU, WHO, in conscious conspiracy, only wish to destroy health.” and, importantly for the case of Gloria, “You can be a part of saving the world’s health – but you have to be brave enough to tackle any case”.

I have recently received in the post some lecture notes from a UK homeopathy school accredited by the Society of Homeopaths. The notes describe a case of someone with a notifiable disease who was treated homeopathically without alerting the authorities, on the basis that the homeopath’s conscience dictated that he should not. To legally notify an allopath would be to alert the enemy, no doubt. When treating cancer homeopathically, the students are told to ‘trust and wait’. I will be writing more about this soon. Being trained to avoid medicine and trust only in homeopathy is mainstream thought in homeopathy, not exceptional.

The other cult-like aspect of homeopathy is its insistence in believing in a spiritual force that is being manipulated by the pills. According to Hahnemann, it is the ‘Vital Force’ that needs help with the pills. This is a vitalistic belief system with no place in modern science. As such, homeopathy is a spiritual belief which requires adherents to accept this quasi-religious world view.

In this light we can see that the parents of Gloria were doing what they were trained to do by the cult of homeopathy. If they had been trained well and had bought into the whole Hahnamanian philosophy then to take their seriously ill baby to an ‘allopath’ would have put it in danger. The only method to treat Gloria was with sugar pills. Homeopaths are taught that symptoms inevitably get worse when treated homeopathically. An ‘aggrevation’ is the remedy working the illness out of the body. No doubt as Gloria deteriorated, their training would have told them that this was a ‘good thing’ and that they should ‘trust and wait’. Her death must have been quite unexpected.

The parents of Gloria Thomas are not an exception. They are not an extreme. They have been good homeopaths and have merely been unlucky and had the misfortune to have the courage to stick with their beliefs. We can see on homeopathic discussion boards that tensions exist about resorting to real medicine when things look bad and that the choice of sticking with homeopathy is a question of “staying strong”. I have written before about the prominent UK homeopath Grace Da Silva-Hill MSc LCPH MARH MAAMET RGN who says about the fatal childhood illness of bacterial meningitis that “It requires a great deal of trust between patient and homeopath, for a serious acute to be treated solely with homeopathy.” Grace also is a supporter of homeopathic treatments for malaria in West Africa.

The implication in all of this is that even with very serious illnesses the homeopath has to stay true and believe in their cult and not betray their beliefs by accessing the outside world and their allopathic ways. Their education is full of denouncements of mainstream medical practice. It is a fundamental part of the creed that vaccinations are harmful and that chemotherapy is a killer. Medical drugs are a collection of side effects and not effective in their own right. Conspiracy theories abound about how ‘Big Pharma’ is out to destroy homeopathy. Harald Walach, Research Professor in Psychology at the University of Northampton has written that homeopaths should “Be proud, not afraid, fight back and don’t duck.” in light of the conspiracy theory that ‘Big Pharma’ is attacking them for homeopathic ‘successes’. Robert Davidson, a founder of one of the London homeopathy schools, describes how Pharmaceutical companies are trying to eliminate things like vitamins “to ensure sickness, so that everyone has to take drugs with no other choices available”. He says they are “evil, so totally evil”. Cults need their evil opponents to survive.

How many Gloria Thomas’s are there out there? It is difficult to know. We hope Gloria is at the extreme end of cases. But how many cancer patients needlessly delay treatment? How many chronic illnesses remain untreated due to such beliefs? Part of the problem is that homeopaths themselves do not collate the sort of records that would help us answer these types of questions. Sites such as What’s the Harm gathers news stories but these must be the tip of the iceberg. In Africa, where missionary homeopaths use homeopathic pills prophylactically to prevent malaria or even treat HIV we can have little idea how much harm is being done. The homeopathic belief is absolute. The current regulatory bodies such as the Society of Homeopaths refuse to discipline their members or even criticise them for taking part in such activities. Understanding homeopathy as a cult makes it easy to see why.

So how can we protect other Glorias? The homeopaths themselves will do nothing. There will be no response to this tragedy from the Society of Homeopaths, the medical Faculty of Homeopaths or even Prince Charles’ Foundation for Integrated Health. When criticism of homeopathy strikes, these organisation most often engage in bluster and obfuscation – or simply ignore the problem.

But, the government recognises that harm can be done by alternative medicine and that some sort of framework needs to be in place to protect the vulnerable. There could be no more vulnerable victim than Gloria, and indeed future infants like her deserve protection. And it is not just homeopaths we need worry about. Chiropractors display similar cult-like attitudes, and indeed much of alternative medicine appears to use similar anti-medical rhetoric to define itself and lock its members into cultish denial. You need only look at at sites such as What Doctors Don’t Tell You to understand the mentality of people attracted to such beliefs.

Unfortunately, UK government, like many other governments, appears to believe that regulating such practices is best done in a way similar to medical practitioners: registration and accreditation of training.

The folly of this is to believe that in doing this you are regulating health care professionals. You are not. You are trying to protect the public from health-threatening cultish beliefs. This is not medicine – it is pseudo-medicine with deluded practitioners. We do not protect people from Scientologists by formally recognising their leaders and giving their ‘Bishops’ seats in the House of Lords. And neither should we protect people from homeopaths by giving them protected title and a stamp of official approval from the Health Professions Council.

The government has pumped lots of money into a new organisation called the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (Ofquack) that claims its primary goal is to “protect the public by means of regulating practitioners on a voluntary register for complementary and natural healthcare practitioners”. It does this by ensuring their members have “undertaken a programme of education and training which meets, as a minimum, the National Occupational Standards for that profession/discipline”. It appears to think that by ensuring that an alternative therapist has been through training then people are protected. Gloria’s legacy should be to show us that this is not the case. Training is the problem, not the solution.

The National Occupational Standards scheme has tried to draw up standards for homeopathic education. These standards are to ensure that practitioners have the right “knowledge and understanding”. But as Professor David Colquhoun says, “no attention whatsoever is paid to the little problem of whether the “knowledge and understanding” are pure gobbledygook or not.” The problem is caused by the fact that these standards were set up in consultation with the Society of Homeopaths; the very people whose members’ beliefs the next baby Gloria needs protecting from. I once complained to the Society of Homeopaths about a homeopath who set up an eczema and asthma clinic. Despite obvious breaches of their own code of ethics, and that the Advertising Standards Authority concluded that this homeopath made “untruthful, unsubstantiated and irresponsible claims”, the Society decided there was no case to answer. The Society of Homeopaths believed that their time was better spent attempting to sue me.

In France, it is illegal to practice Homeopathy without a medical license. There is no such thing as lay homeopathy there and the Society of Homeopaths would be an illegal organisation. How much this protects people though is debatable. France has an enormous over-the-counter homeopathy trade through pharmacies, with Boiron, a homeopathic sugar pill manufacturer, making hundreds of millions of Euros from their big vat of sugar pills. The French self-medicate with homeopathy and their doctors are free to dish them out, although the state is fortunately reducing the amount it reimburses people for sugar pills. At least if a doctor prescribes a sugar pill when a placebo treatment is not required, then the regulatory bodies could well step in.

In the UK, we appear to be moving in the direction of legitimising various forms of quackery through various forms of state approval and recognition through statutory regulation. It is a disastrous move. There are currently reviews taking place for the regulation of acupuncture and herbal medicine. The same problems exist there with degree courses in Chinese medicine teaching students how to weasel word around regulation when making claims to treat cancer. Regulation of this style will put people at risk. The chiropractors have already achieved protected title and statutory regulation. This may not last much longer though as the regulator buckles under the weight of hundreds of complaints about chiropractors bogusly claiming to treat children’s illnesses in the light of the Simon Singh affair.

I believe a significant part of the answer is already with us. We do not need new regulation and statutory recognition of pseudo-medical cults. We need prosecution.

We already have the laws that say you cannot make false claims when selling goods and services. The Trading Standards laws are explicit in saying you cannot make false medicinal claims. What is not happening is enforcement of these laws as Trading Standards do not appear to have the training to go after these sorts of breaches. I would think it would be far more cost effective to provide this training rather than set up useless regulatory regimes for registering quacks.

The other change that would greatly help is for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency(MHRA) to drop its ridiculous stance on believing you only have to ensure homeopathic medicines are safe. No one disputes sugar pills are intrinsically safe – there is nothing in them. The MHRA though allow homeopaths to submit pseudoscientific ‘traditional’ evidence for a pill’s effectiveness so that they can make claims on packets. The MHRA legitimises dangerous quackery with homeopathy and it undermines its authority in doing so.

In summary, protecting future children like baby Gloria will require authorities to abandon the belief that they need to regulate homeopaths like medical practitioners and instead treat them according to the more accurate picture of them being a pseudo-medical and mystical cult with dangerous and irrational beliefs.

Related posts:

1. Homeopaths: Do You Really Want Statutory Regulation? This is an open letter to all homeopaths in the UK. It has been a bit of a surprise to me to learn that the Society of Homeopaths is wanting...
2. Medical Astrology – Forseeing the Future of Regulated Alternative Medicine Part of the wonderful new world of regulated alternative medicine is the insistence that all registered practitioners undergo Continuous Professional Development. Just like in real professions, quacks will be expected...
3. The Future of Homeopathy in the UK After several decades of increasing popularity, the homeopathic community is finding itself under growing pressure. There is an increasing level of criticism of the practice coming from many quarters, including...

It has been a bit of a surprise to me to learn that the Society of Homeopaths is wanting to lobby the Health Professions Council to include homeopathy within its regulation remit. As such, you will receive protected title (only registered homeopaths will be able to call themselves that) and be held against a code of standards and ethics.

Why do you want to do this? I can guess some of the reasons.

Homeopathy has always battled to be recognised – both as a science and as a healing profession. Deep within the homeopathic mindset is a belief that you hold a valuable principle of healing, if not the fundamental theory of healing. Over two centuries you have battled to gain acceptance and validation against what you see as a hostile (even conspiratorial) medical profession. You call the medical profession allopaths and define yourselves in opposition to your own picture of them.

Undoubtedly, you see that statutory regulation will put yourself at least on a par with doctors. You will no longer legally be invisible in the healing professions. But there are other more economic reasons too. Being statutorily registered will make it easier to gain referrals from the huge source of cash that is the NHS. It will also make it easier to get payments from private health insurers. You won’t have to pay VAT, although I doubt many of you make enough to have to worry about that. Universities have recently said that they will not teach BSc courses to train homeopathic practitioners unless they achieve statutory regulation.

So, the prize appears to be huge. Recognition, financial gain and the secured future of your profession through accredited education. The Society of Homeopaths can free itself of the tedious burden of having to pretend to regulate you and instead become something like the BCA and concentrate more on trying to sue its critics.

But what of the cost? Such rewards will come at a price – and I am amazed that the Society of Homeopaths believes you will wish to pay that price.

First, before we look at what this might all mean for homeopathy, I would suggest that the path to Statutory regulation will not be easy. I am sure you are aware that there are many people who think such a step would be absurd, myself included. Homeopathy has failed in two hundred years to make any progression in showing that it is nothing other than a inert treatment based on pre-scientific and magical thinking. The basic science to show that your principles are true is not there. My own simple challenge to homeopaths to demonstrate their fundamental propositions has not been taken up in 85 weeks. More damningly, in the two hundred years since homeopathy was invented, our scientific understanding of medicine, chemistry and physics has moved on enormously and it clearly shows that homeopathy is not just implausible but is utterly contradicted by everything we know about the world. Homeopathy lies outside of reason and science. It is a pseudo-medicine and is just a placebo therapy. It is just not tenable to hold any other position.

To gain statutory regulation, you will have to demonstrate that it is indeed possible to have meaningful standards in education and training for a pseudoscientific subject. That is not impossible – the current government has on the whole failed to see the problem with regulating absurd treatments. It is funding Ofquack, the Prince Charles backed Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, as a voluntary regulator for a rag bag of quack practitioners. The government does not appear to see that upholding such people to high degrees of training and competence is problematic when such people believe in absurdities. I would suggest though that the HPC may well be tougher judges than Prince Charles.

So, onto the costs. In order to appreciate what such regulation might mean for homeopaths it is worth looking at what it has done for other statutorily regulated alternative medicines. Chiropractic would be a good example.

The regulation of chiropractic was not without its controversy. The Society of Homeopaths claim that 65% of its members support the route to such regulation. The Society of Homeopaths only represents 65% of homeopaths, so we can only be sure that 42% of homeopaths support such a route. Even then, this survey was taken in 2006 and a lot has changed since then. I would be very surprised if this support has grown. Are the majority of you in favour of this move? Chiropractors were also split when the Chiropractic Act was brought in. Many saw it as an attempt to control their practice and restrict what they could do. Chiropractic philosophy appears to embrace a libertarian stance and many resented passing control of their work to people who may not share their beliefs and views. Some were worried that the move had conspiratorial overtones of the medical community trying to suppress an alternative to them. There were quite a few who refused to be registered and had to cease calling themselves chiropractors and instead called themselves simply spinal manipulators or even the grand sounding osteomyologists.

Over a decade later, the political infighting still continues. Many resent that the McTimoney Chiropractors were let into the exclusive regulated club. McTimoney is seen as a chiropractic heresy where bones are not cracked so violently and training takes place through part-time courses. It is not seen as being real chiropractic and the practitioners as being undertrained – through cheaper courses. It represents a threat to the chiropractors who will have invested well over £40,000 in fees for their training at one of the other two ‘real’ chiropractic colleges.

The General Chiropractic Council, the regulatory body, appears to be popularly despised by the ordinary chiropractor. It is seen as heavy handed in its regulation, costly and not in tune with chiropractors’ needs (to be left alone). It has no duty to promote chiropractic but only to protect the public and enforce its code of conduct. It is also increasingly dominated by lay representatives – chiropractors are getting a smaller voice in its running. Much of this resentment has been well documented on the chiropractic blog chiropracticlive.com.

When the British Chiropractic Association decided to sue Simon Singh for criticising the lack of evidence base for the treatments it was promoting, I doubt they understood the difficulty they would be putting their members in because of the very fact that they were statutory regulated. The ensuing debate has exposed the non existent foundations of much of chiropractic care and this has led to an unprecedented number of complaints being made to the GCC about chiropractors misleading the public on their websites for the effectiveness of the treatments they offered. There are now perhaps 20-30% of the entire chiropractic profession undergoing statutory complaints procedures which could result in the loss of their registration and their ability to practice.

The mistake the government and chiropractors made in accepting statutory regulation was allowing it to go ahead before chiropractors could demonstrate that they were not simply a vestigial remnant of Victorian back cracking quackery. Now, chiropractors find themselves being held to the highest forms of professionalism and practice without an evidence base for pretty much anything they do. It is now possible that chiropractic in the UK will not survive the current onslaught of professional complaints and trading standards investigations being pursued against them. What will come out the other side is pretty much anyone’s guess, but I am pretty sure it is not a situation that the majority of chiropractors would have wished for in their quest for recognition.

And this is what I find extraordinary about the attempt by homeopaths to join the HPC. At present, the nightmare that is happening to chiropractors cannot happen to homeopaths. Despite what you say, you have had the freedom of living without any form of genuine regulation. The Society of Homeopaths has never ruled against a homeopath for the way they practice when when faced with clear breaches of the code of ethics. Homeopaths have been free to indulge in whatever delusions they fancy without fear of sanction. You have claimed to treat malaria and AIDS and have done so without a single voice of censure from within the lay homeopathic trade. You have no idea what it is like to be regulated and to be subject to a real code of ethics and practice. I suggest you pop along to your nearest chiropractor to find out what it is like.

And I must say that chiropractors have it fairly easy. Their treatments (at least for lower back pain) have an air of plausibility and some evidence for effectiveness. Homeopaths lack these luxuries of plausibility and reliable evidence for anything. What makes your situation worse is that your belief set is acutely in conflict with those who will become your statutory medical colleagues. You regularly undermine public healthcare messages about childhood inoculation and believe your sugar pills are an alternative. You show no sense of boundaries for what you can reasonably hope to achieve and make claims to be a superior treatment for everything from asthma and swine flu to autism and cancer. Do you really believe you could continue with your alternative beliefs in a statutory world? And they are alternative. Whilst you denounce the side effects of real medicine as being avoidable by homeopathy you pitch yourself against the medical world. And I doubt that a regulated profession could last long with such rhetoric.

Homeopaths. You have never had it so good. And you do not realise it. You are pretty much free from any constraint on what you say and do. You may moan about the continuous criticism you get from people like me – but that is the worst you have to suffer at the moment – criticism. If by some fluke you do manage to achieve full regulation, expect your cosy world to come crashing down very fast. Your quest for regulatory recognition will be hubris. It took over fifteen years for the chiropractors to realise they had been practising on borrowed time. Your regulatory nemesis will come much quicker.

Related posts:

1. Is Statutory Self-Regulation the Answer for Homeopathy? The ambush by the Prince of Wales on the various factions of Alternative Medicine by announcing the set up of the Natural Healthcare Council, Ofquack, is starting to have effects....
2. The Society of Homeopaths: The Failure of Self Regulation The Adverting Standards Authority has today found that a homeopath advertised their asthma clinic for kids by making untruthful, unsubstantiated and irresponsible claims. Archway House Natural Health Centre holds...
3. The University of Wales is Responsible for Enabling Bogus* Chiropractic Claims to be Made The Simon Singh/BCA libel case is having the unintended consequence of the media being full of reports of the strange beliefs of chiropractors. They are a cult like body of...

Part of the problem is that, at the moment, Ofquack is only allowing nutritional therapists and massage therapists to join. The bulk of the members so far are massage therapists with just a few nutritionists having paid the fee. The CNHC claims to have the cooperation of the ‘professional’ bodies that represent the trades they want to regulate. Is this really true? My first ever post on the CNHC suggested that the new body was struggling to gain the support of existing bodies, and that this problem appeared to be so severe as to threaten the new bodies very existence.

Nutritional Therapists have a ‘professional body’ called BANT, the British Association for Applied Nutrition and Nutritional Therapy. BANT appear to back the formation of a unified regulator and have issued the following statement:

So, how come so few nutritional therapists have joined? Let’s have a look at the governing council of BANT and the members who are qualified and working in some professional capacity as a nurtritional therapist:

Running each of these names through the CNHC register uncovers that not one of these people has bothered to register themselves with the new regulator. It would look as if BANT is not fully behind this enterprise.

BANT is not the only body representing nutritionists. The Nutritional Therapy Council claims to be the current regulator and, according the Princes’ Foundation for Integrated Health, is “transferring the administration of its practitioner register” to the CNHC. How many of the senior nutritionists at the NTC have joined Ofquack? Well, in a display of superb openness and transparency, the NTC do not list their officers and so we cannot find out who their leaders are.

However, we can guess that not too many have rushed to join the register. For despite early signs of eagerness to join this state sponsored enterprise, the NTC issued the following statement last  February,

So, the NTC have for some reason seen fit not to transfer their powers away. Why, we do not know.

What of other senior figures in the world of Nutritional Therapy. Well, the most obvious figure is Patrick Holford, the founder of the Institute of Optimum Nutrition that has trained a significant fraction of the UK’s nutritionists. Well, obviously, Patrick has not seen fit to register himself, despite his claims to be at the forefront of  patient research. What of his various organisations that he has involvement with, like ION and the Brain Bio Institute? Well, the ION runs patient clinics. We can see a list of nutrionists who work with the public,

No. Not a single registration.

Are their education team setting an example to their students?

So, our tax money has funded the registration of quacks with the CNHC to the sum of about £4,000 per quack. It is not clear where they are going to get the money they need to keep going. The registration fees they have so far collected would keep them going for about a week. Other professions are supposed to be joining soon. Will they be forthcoming? So far only the massage therapists have been in any way compliant. And then only a couple of hundred of them.

Things must be getting pretty frantic. If Ofquack cannot get the nutritionists to play ball then the whole project must be over now. How much more money will they waste before the inevitable happens?

It is about time the government took a fresh look at this whole issue. The current situation has arisen after a House of Lords report in 2000 recommended a unified register for a wide range of alternative medicine practitioners. The governments big mistake was to put the process of setting this up in the hands of Prince Charles. Nothing sensible was ever going to be forthcoming. the farce was was predictable. It has happened.

Related posts:

1. Will the Government Bail Out Ofquack? It does not take a lot of analysis to realise that the newly formed Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council is going to be in a desperate financial state quite soon....
2. The Failure of Openness at Ofquack I was going to call this post “The Failure of IT at Ofquack”, but I think the failure is a little deeper than computers. The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council...
3. Government bails out Ofquack as it rewrites old press release   Last March I asked, “Will the government bail out Ofquack?” when it was becoming very clear that the new government backed ‘regulator’ for pseudo-medical trades people (quacks) were running...

Website Hackers

We are extremely disappointed to have to share with you that we have had a number of unprecedented attempts by hackers to disable our website. We are currently taking IT and legal advice on how to resolve these issues.

Meanwhile we have reduced some aspects of the register’s functionality in order to ensure the security of personal details of applicants and registrants on the CNHC register.

If you have any difficulty in accessing any part of the CNHC website or retrieving information please call CNHC on 020 3178 2199 or e-mail info@cnhc.org.uk and we will assist you with your enquiries.

Added: 01-04-2009

This sounds quite serious. Unprecedented attempts by hackers to disable their website? I am not so sure it is as simple as that. Firstly, a number of people have noticed that the CNHC were listing their members’ full personal details. Search for a name by putting in an initial letter and all quacks that had joined were listed along with all their details. It was easy to do so. The search functionality allowed you to enter simple wildcards and the results would list everyone on their register. Not only names, but home addresses and telephone numbers.

Their own privacy policy states,

The Published Register
CNHC will make part of your register entry available to any enquirer as part of the published register.

The public can inspect the following information on the online register:

• Your full name
• Your profession or practice discipline
• Your approximate work location
• Your registration number
• Any restrictions imposed on your registration

Your home address, contact details, date of birth and other data are not available to the public.

In publishing their registrant personal contact details, the CNHC were in quite a serious breach of trust. The legality of publishing the details is dubious too, since the Data Protection Act insists data is only used for stated purposes.

In the last few days, it is no longer possible to gain these details on the CNHC web site. Far from them “reducing some aspects of the register’s functionality” because of “hackers”, the CNHC have finally stopped dishing out their members private data to all and sundry. Hackers have nothing to do with the “loss of functionality” – they were managing to cause privacy leaks all on their own.

But did some malicious person try to disable their web site? Well, last week I twittered that the CNHC web site was down. Well, it was not quite down, but the content management system was spewing out an error. What was quite remarkable was that a complete dump of debugging information was being returned to my browser. This information was giving me lots of information about the nature of their server and he code they were using to run the web site. In web site security rulebooks, this is a number one no no. “If an error is encountered, do not return technical error information to the user”. Such information is invaluable to a real hacker. Even if a hacker does compromise your server, you do not return more fuel for them to use. There is only really one conclusion I can make – Ofquack’s IT team are utterly incompetent. I can well believe that the CNHC management were told “it woz hackerz wot dun it” when the web site crashed.

So, it would look like the CNHC IT system is not fit for purpose. Not only was there a failure to describe proper functional requirements for the web site, including what data should be displayed, it would also look like it has been coded in a compromisingly amateurish way. I would not want my own data on the site.

I have no idea if hackers really did have a go at their site. And I would not condone such silliness. But the CNHC would appear to have been negligent in not anticipating problems and in not protecting their data. The web is a wild place and there are people out there who like attacking naive web sites just for the hell of it. You need to be prepared. You do not leave your front door open just because you live in a nice village of homeopaths and nutritionists.

But the bigger issue is that Ofquack is not being entirely open. There may well be people who want to see a list of registered members for perfectly legitimate reasons. The CNHC are providing a public service and have been funded by public money. We deserve some transparency in what they are doing, especially given that they have been so heavily criticised. They claim in their statement of values to be “open and transparent in our business”. I see little evidence of this.

My main criticism of the CNHC is that they have failed to answer the single most important question about themselves. Given that their “key purpose” is to “protect the public by means of regulating practitioners” they have not said how this is possible when they will not take into account if any of the alternative medicine techniques they claim to regulate are actually effective. If their members are making false, delusional or even fraudulent claims to the public, how do the CNHC claim to protect the public if they are not concerned about the truth of their members’ claims? There has been no “open and transparent” response to this concern.

Their website claims that “in order to meet our commitment to transparency, CNHC will make the minutes of its Board Meetings available.” They have failed to do this. Worse, they had published some minutes but have since removed them from public scrutiny.

I can speculate why this must be. In my last blog post on Ofquack, I noted that they had only managed to attract about 150 members. Given that they need 10,000 members to break even, they have managed to acquire independent funding to keep them afloat for a week. They have achieved less than 2% of their required income levels. Maybe they are hoping that by starting to regulate more forms of quackery later this year, they will make up the missing 98%. I would suggest, like all quackery, they are indulging in wishful thinking.

So, panic must be setting in. The main aspect of their register’s functionality they have removed is the ability to easily see how many members they have attracted. I would suggest that this is not the result of ‘hackers’, but an attempt to keep under wraps the increasing failure of this folly.

Related posts:

1. Will the Government Bail Out Ofquack? It does not take a lot of analysis to realise that the newly formed Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council is going to be in a desperate financial state quite soon....
2. Government bails out Ofquack as it rewrites old press release   Last March I asked, “Will the government bail out Ofquack?” when it was becoming very clear that the new government backed ‘regulator’ for pseudo-medical trades people (quacks) were running...
3. Nutritional Therapists Fail to Join Ofquack The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, Ofquack, is having an appalling start to its life. Needing 10,000 people to join its register in the first year to break even, it...

Related posts:

1. Nutritional Therapists Fail to Join Ofquack The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, Ofquack, is having an appalling start to its life. Needing 10,000 people to join its register in the first year to break even, it...
2. Prince Charles’ Ofquack is a Dead Duck Prince Charles’ Foundation for Integrated Health and its new regulatory quango, the Natural Healthcare Council (or Ofquack, as it is bound to become known), is due to launch in April....
3. Government bails out Ofquack as it rewrites old press release   Last March I asked, “Will the government bail out Ofquack?” when it was becoming very clear that the new government backed ‘regulator’ for pseudo-medical trades people (quacks) were running...

In 2000, the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee looked into the regulation of non-medically trained health workers. It asked the Prince of Wales Foundation to look into setting up a body to mop up all the ‘harmless’ CAM therapies, such as reiki, massage, aromatherapy, yoga and homeopathy. Alternative therapies that have the potential to have real effects on people such as osteopathy, herbalism and acupuncture have already been statutorily regulated or are soon set to be. Ofquack, The Natural Healthcare Council, will not be a statutory body; it will be voluntary (for now) and will involve representatives from each ‘discipline’ and lay people to help self-regulate.

The idea behind setting up this new body is to attempt to provide protection to the public from exploitative or dangerous practices. The Quackometer believes the structure of the body will mean that it will be impotent to carry out this role. For this reason, I am disappointed that Ofquack is being set up in its present from and I would hope Prince Charles team, headed by Professor Dame Joan Higgins, would stop and think again.

However, I need not worry. As is becoming increasingly clear, large swathes of the alternative medicine industry want nothing to do with this initiative. This was totally predictable and the consequences are going to be hilarious.

Let’s start with the Homeopaths. The Society of Homeopaths has issued the following press release following yesterday’s report on Ofquack in The Times,

As the UK’s largest membership association and regulator of homeopaths, The Society of Homeopaths supports the establishment of an independent single register and regulatory body for homeopaths. Indeed, a recent survey of its membership indicated that at least 65% would support statutory regulation for homeopaths.

Registered members of The Society of Homeopaths (identifiable by the designation ‘RSHom’) have a recognised professional qualification, comprehensive insurance and have agreed to abide by a strict Code of Ethics & Practice.

The Society of Homeopaths has yet to assess the suitability and standards of the Natural Healthcare Council for the purpose of providing regulation of homeopaths.

Paula Ross
Chief Executive

Now, as with all press releases from SoH, you have to take great care in interpreting what they are saying. Let me do that delicate task for you and sum up their thoughts…

“Over our dead bodies.”

The Alliance of Registered Homeopaths has been a little more straight talking over Ofquack. Karin Mont of ARH, wrote in their in house rag, Homeopathy in Practice:

Federal Voluntary Self Regulation [Ofquack] is a recently introduced concept that is intended to bring a diverse group of complementary therapies under one central control. The homeopathy profession has been unanimous in rejecting federalisation as an option for regulation.

In other words,

“Over our dead bodies.”

It’s not just the homeopaths that are hostile to Prince Charles’ new quackery club. The Reiki practitioners (wave their hands around to ‘channel healing energy’) set up their own regulatory committee to ‘respond’ to the development of Ofquack.

On their web site they now note,

Following a meeting in November 07, The RRWG has now formally withdrawn from the Federal Working Group set up by the Princes Trust for Integrated Health. The Group is considering its options and the way forward in January 2008.

Further explanation is given in a letter from Anthony Perry, Chair of the Reiki Regulatory Working Group. He explains that no-touch Reiki practitioners are looking for ‘light touch’ regulation. Central to this is the desire that,

We believe the Regulator should have an overriding duty to regulate the practitioners, but not the practices or therapies themselves, e.g. such as the teaching of Reiki in its many diverse forms.

So, in short: you may keep a list of our members, but don’t dare tell us how to wave our hands around and who we can wave them over.

The aromatherapists are not quite so well organised. They too have set up a regulatory body, but it looks still-born. Their web site http://www.aromatherapy-regulation.org.uk/ appears to be down. For some insight, we must look at the few aromatherapy bloggers around.

Tony Burfield on the aromaconnection blog writes that the ’sky fell in’ with the announcement of the set up of Ofquack. He thinks it will be an “an unmitigated disaster for CAM”. Tony then goes into a lot of conspiracy theories, describing Sense about Science as ’sinister’. He clearly believes there is some sort of corporate conspiracy to control aromatherapists. Tony smells a rat.

But tellingly, he says,

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

One would have thought that aromatherapists could have done with all the friends they needed, but it looks like one more case of,

“Over our dead bodies.”

Tony concludes with a prayer:

Please pray with us that Prof. Edvard[sic] 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!

I think we can see a full picture now amongst the various proposed members of Ofquack. There is deep suspicion that they will not be allowed to practice the way they wish to practice. Homeopaths do not even trust each other to regulate themselves with at least ten different registering factions looking after the interests of different beliefs. And worse, heaven forbid that a scientist like Ernst should get involved and apply some reason and evidence to their regulation. (Fortunately for Tony, I doubt Ernst will get invited to this little party. Charley and Edzard are not the closest of friends.)

We also see fear of conspiracies. Ofquack will receive government funding and this lays it open to charges of being controlled by the enemies of quackery. Users and practitioners of alternative medicine have a strong anti-establishment streak about them. Asking them to trust in Ofquack will be like asking wildebeest to use crocodile endorsed river crossings.

But the biggest problems lie in the arrogance and independence of each faction. The homeopaths are the worst. They see themselves as a ‘complete system of medicine’ and holders of the true keys to healing. Other healing practices are wrong or corrupt. To lump homeopaths in with the smell sniffers, the crystal danglers, the foot ticklers and the bendy yoga lovers would be a deep humiliation for them and a completely unacceptable loss of autonomy and status.

Over their dead bodies.

Related posts:

1. Will the Government Bail Out Ofquack? It does not take a lot of analysis to realise that the newly formed Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council is going to be in a desperate financial state quite soon....
2. Is Statutory Self-Regulation the Answer for Homeopathy? The ambush by the Prince of Wales on the various factions of Alternative Medicine by announcing the set up of the Natural Healthcare Council, Ofquack, is starting to have effects....
3. Andy Burman Resigns From Ofquack Andy Burman, Chief Executive of the British Dietetic Association, appears to have resigned his post from the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (Ofquack). This news follows my recent criticism...