law
Since homeopathy was invented by Samuel Hahnemann about 200 years ago, a steadily growing group of critics have raised their voices more and more loudly. Usually they come from doctors or scientists and only rarely from the legal profession.
Yet, there are exceptions: an Australian barrister and professor of law has published an analysis of “a series of criminal, civil, disciplinary and coronial decisions from difference countries in relation to homeopathic medicine where outcomes have been tragic”. He concludes that “there is an urgent need for reflection and response within the health sector generally, consumer protection authorities, and legal policy-makers about the steps that should be taken to provide community protection from dangerous homeopathic practice”.
He also questions whether homeopathy can ever be registered alongside other health care professionals:
“Until such time as homoeopathy can scientifically justify its fundamental tenets,… it cannot be said that its claims for therapeutic efficacy can be justifiable. This leaves the profession not just exposed to criticisms,… but potentially open to consumer protection actions directed toward whether its representations are false, misleading and deceptive, to civil litigation when its promises have not been fulfilled, and especially when persons have died, and to criminal actions in respect of the financial advantage that is obtained by its practitioners from their representations.
The distressing cases referred to here which led to avoidable deaths and the multiple accusations leveled against homoeopathy require of the profession at least a formal repudiation of the practitioners concerned… In addition, they demand an unequivocal response that homoeopathy will discipline its own in a robust and open way. If the profession is to acquire any scientific credibility, which is difficult to conceive of, the deaths to which homoeopathy has contributed…also require that homoeopathy actively generate a defensible research basis that justifies its claims to efficacy of outcome for its patients. It is only then that the claims of the medical establishment that homoeopathy is a dangerous and too often a lethal form of quackery will be able to be contested rationally. In the meantime, it is timely to consider further the status that homoeopathy has within the general and health care communities and whether that status can be scientifically, ethically or legally justified”.
I believe this legal view to be highly significant. The persistent criticism from skeptics, concerned scientists and doctors has rarely been translated into decisions about health care provision. Homeopaths tended to respond to our criticism by producing anecdotes, unconvincing or cherry-picked data or by producing outright lies, for instance in relation to the “Swiss government’s report” on homeopathy.
In this context, it is worth noting that, in some countries, homeopaths who have no medical qualifications have been accused to practice medicine without a licence. The case of Dana Ullman in the US is probably the most spectecular such incident; this is how one pro-homeopathy site describes it:
Dana is perhaps the person who has done the most for homeopathy since his court case in that he pursues the evangelism of homeopathy through the NCH and his mail order company… He prescribed homeopathic medicine and was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. But he won an important settlement in 1977 in the Oakland Municipal Court in which the court allowed his practice under two stipulations:
- that he did not diagnose or treat disease and that he refers to medical doctors for the diagnosis and treatment of disease;
- that he makes contracts with his patients that clearly define his role as a non-medical homeopathic practitioner and the patient’s role in seeking his care.
But such cases are not the only occasions for lawyers to look at homeopathy. Recently there has been a class action against the Boiron, the world’s largest manufacturer of homeopathic preparations. It was alleged that Boiron made bogus claims for one of its remedies, and there was a settlement worth millions of dollars. Similar cases are likely to follow, e.g.:
- Nelsons Homeopathy (Rescue Remedy, Bach Original Flower Remedies, Pure & Clear, Arnileve, H+Care)
- CVS Homeopathic Products (Flu Relief, Cold Relief, Cold Remedy, Ear Pain Relief)
- Nature’s Innovation (Naturasil Skin Tags, Bed Bug Patrol, Naturasil Scabies)
- Boericke & Tafel Cold/Flu
- Homeolab USA (Kids Relief Cough & Cold)
In June 2003, a British High Court Judge ordered two mothers to ensure that their daughters are appropriately vaccinated. The ruling concerned two separate cases brought by fathers who wanted their daughters immunized despite opposition by the girls’ unwed mothers
The fact that, in the UK and other countries, homeopathic placebos are still being sold as “vaccines” for the prevention of serious, life-threatening infections is, in my view nothing short of a scandal. The fact that a leading figure at Ainsworth actively misleads the public about these products is an outrage. It is high time therefore that the legal profession looks seriously at the full range of issues related to homeopathy with a view of stopping the dangerous nonsense.
Daniels and Vogel recently published an article entitled “Consent in osteopathy: A cross sectional survey of patients’ information and process preferences” (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF OSTEOPATHIC MEDICINE 2012, 15:3, p.92-102). It addresses an important yet woefully under-researched area.
I find most laudable that two osteopaths conduct research into medical ethics; but the questions still are, does the article tell us anything worth knowing and is it sufficiently rigorous and critical? As the journal does not seem to be available on Medline, I cannot provide a link. I therefore take the liberty of quoting the most important bits from directly the abstract here.
Objective: To explore and describe patients’ preferences of consent procedures in a sample of UK osteopathic patients.
Methods: A cross sectional survey using a new questionnaire was performed incorporating paper and web-based versions of the instruments. 500 copies were made available, (n = 200) to patients attending the British School of Osteopathy (BSO) clinic, and (n = 300) for patients attending 30 randomly sampled osteopaths in practice. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively to assess patient preferences; non-parametric analyses were performed to test for preference difference between patients using demographic characteristics.
Results: 124 completed questionnaires were returned from the BSO sample representing a 41% response rate. None were received from patients attending practices outside of the BSO clinic. The majority (98%) of patient respondents thought that having information about rare yet potentially severe risks of treatment was important. Patients’ preferred to have this information presented during the initial consultation (72%); communication method favoured was verbal (90%). 99% would like the opportunity to ask questions about risks, and all respondents (100%) consider being informed about their current diagnosis as important.
Conclusion: Patients endorse the importance of information exchange as part of the consent process. Verbal communication is very important and is the favoured method for both receiving information and giving consent. Further research is required to test the validity of these results in practice samples
The 0% response-rate in patients from non-BSO practices is, of course, remarkable and not without irony. In my view, it highlights better than anything else the fact that informed consent rarely appears on the osteopathic radar screen. In a way, this increases the praise we should give the two authors for tackling the issue.
The central question of the survey is whether patients want to know about the risks of osteopathy. This is more than a little bizarre: informed consent is not an option, it is a legal, moral and ethical obligation. It seems therefore odd to ask the question “do you want to learn about the risks which you are about to be exposed to?”
Even odder is, I think, the second question “when do you want to receive this information?” It goes without saying that informed consent has to happen before the intervention! This is what, common sense tells us, the law dictates and ethical codes prescribe.
There is general agreement amongst health care professionals and ethicist that verbal consent does suffice in most therapeutic situations, that patients must have the opportunity to ask questions, and that informed consent also extends to diagnostic issues. So, the questions referring to these issues are also a bit strange or naive, in my view.
The article might be revealing mostly by what it does not address rather than by what it tells us. It would be really valuable to know the percentage of osteopaths who abide by the legal, moral and ethical imperative of informed consent in their daily practice. To the best of my knowledge, this information is not available [if anyone has such information, please let me know and provide the reference]. Assuming that it is similar to the percentage of UK chiropractors who obtain informed consent, it might be seriously wanting: only 45% of them routinely obtain informed consent from their patients.
Another issue that, in my view, would be relevant to clarify is the nature of the information provided by osteopaths to patients, other than that of serious risks associated with spinal manipulation/mobilisation. Do they tell their patients about the evidence suggesting that osteopathy does (not) work for the condition at hand? Do they elaborate on non-osteopathic treatments for that disease? I fear that the answers to these questions might well be negative.
Imagine a patient being told that there is no good evidence for effectiveness of osteopathy, that the possibility of some harm exists, and that other interventions might actually do more good than harm than what the osteopath has to offer. How likely is it that this patient would agree to receiving osteopathic treatment?
For most alternative practitioners, including osteopaths, informed consent and most other important ethical issues have so far remained highly uncomfortable areas. This may have a good and simple reason: they have the potential to become real and serious threats to their current practice and business. I suspect this is why there is so very little awareness of and research into the ethics of alternative medicine: “best not to wake sleeping lions”, seems to be the general attitude.
The survey by Daniels and Vogel, even though it touches upon an important topic, avoids the truly pertinent questions. It therefore looks to me a bit like a fig leaf shamefully hiding an area of potential embarrassment.
And where do we go from here? I predict that the current strategy of alternative practitioners to ignore and violate medical ethics as much as possible will not be tolerated for much longer. Double standards in health care cannot and should not survive. The sooner we begin addressing some of these uncomfortable questions with rigorous research, the better – perhaps not for the practitioner but certainly for the patient.
Guest post by Louise Lubetkin
A while ago this sardonic little vignette, titled Medicine Through the Ages, was doing the rounds on the Internet:
2000 B.C. – Here, eat this root.
1000 A.D. – That root is pagan. Here, say this prayer.
1750 A.D. – That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
1900 A.D. – That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.
1985 A.D. – That pill is ineffective. Here, take this antibiotic.
2000 A.D. – That antibiotic is unnatural. Here, eat this root.
We seem to have come full circle. The idea of health as a personal goal, something that can be achieved by taking nutritional supplements such as herbal preparations, vitamins and minerals, is a fundamental tenet of alternative medicine. Consequently the rise of alternative medicine has been accompanied by a parallel rise in the use of dietary supplements.
Most people assume that dietary supplements, like pharmaceuticals, are thoroughly tested before being allowed onto the market, and that in any case because they are “natural” they are ipso facto safe.
Neither assumption is correct.
First of all, it is a great mistake to assume that all “natural” substances are harmless and therefore fit for consumption. (Fugu anyone? Perhaps with some sautéed Amanita mushrooms?) Secondly, unlike pharmaceuticals, which must undergo protracted pre-market testing for safety and efficacy, dietary supplements need not undergo even rudimentary testing before being sold over the counter to the public.
Supplement usage is at an all-time high. Currently, almost 50 percent of us regularly take supplements. The older you are, the more likely you are to take them: usage climbs to 70 percent amongst people 70 years and older. Similarly, the more formal education you have had, and the higher your income level, the more likely you are to be a regular consumer of dietary supplements.
Our collective enthusiasm for taking supplements has undoubtedly done considerably more for the health of the supplement industry than it has for that of the public. There is mounting research evidence to suggest that taking dietary supplements may neither be as safe nor beneficial to health as has previously been assumed (more on this in another post). Nevertheless, physicians seem to be just as vulnerable as the rest of us to the blandishments of the supplement industry. According to one study published in the Journal of Nutrition, 75 percent of dermatologists, 73 percent of orthopedists and 57 percent of cardiologists reported personally using dietary supplements. An earlier study by the same research group found that a staggering 79 percent of physicians and 82 percent of nurses reported recommending dietary supplements to their patients. Of course the fact that supplements come with a personal recommendation by a physician only serves to reinforce the public’s ill-founded presumption of safety.
The manufacture and sale of supplements is a hugely profitable business, generating more than $25 billion in annual sales and contributing an estimated $60 billion to the US economy. While most other industries have languished during the current economic downturn, the supplement industry has grown steadily: overall, between 2008 and 2012, sales of supplements rose by 31.7 percent.
(Ironically, the huge popularity of these so-called “natural” health products has not escaped the notice of agribusiness and pharmaceutical giants such as Kellogg’s, Pfizer, Monsanto and others, all of which have now begun manufacturing and marketing nutritional supplements of their own.)
None of this would have been possible had it not been for the 1994 enactment by the US Congress of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), an extraordinarily ill-conceived piece of legislation that drastically weakened the FDA’s regulatory control over vitamins, minerals, herbal, botanical and other “traditional” medical products. Prior to DSHEA, these products were classified as drugs and were therefore subject to FDA regulation. By reclassifying them as foods rather than drugs DSHEA effectively removed dietary supplements from FDA regulatory oversight. As a result, supplement manufacturers became exempt from any obligation to perform pre-market testing for purity, safety or effectiveness, and it became infinitely harder for the FDA to detect unsafe products and quickly remove them from the market.
While the FDA does have the authority to insist that manufacturers refrain from making unsubstantiated health claims, it no longer has the power to mandate removal of unsafe products from the market without first clearing the almost insurmountable legal hurdle of proving significant risk. In other words, DSHEA inverts the responsibility for ensuring safety. Before the FDA can act, consumers must first be harmed sufficiently seriously, and in sufficient numbers, to trigger an investigation.
In one fell legislative swoop, DSHEA dished up a profit bonanza to the supplement industry while simultaneously robbing the public of any meaningful protection. Thus disencumbered of all but token regulation, the dietary supplement industry quickly burgeoned. In 1994, when DSHEA was enacted, there were just 4,000 dietary supplements on the market. Today there are more than 75,000.
The brave new world spawned by DSHEA is well exemplified by the ephedra case. Herbal weight loss supplements containing the plant alkaloids ephedra and ephedrine were linked to a string of over 150 deaths and countless other serious adverse events. Metabolife, the manufacturer of the supplement, received 15,000 complaints of adverse events – including deaths – related to the product, yet was under no obligation to alert the FDA, and (not surprisingly) chose not to do so.
It took a full 10 years of intense legal fighting for the FDA to succeed in getting ephedra-containing supplements removed from the market. Undeterred, powerful industry lobbying groups and vociferous opponents of regulation mounted a successful appeal challenging the legality of the FDA ban, and ephedra supplements once again went on sale in several states. The ruling against FDA was eventually overturned on appeal and the ephedra ban was upheld, but the cost, difficulty and duration of the legal process of restricting access to this dangerous “natural” supplement was staggering. Yet even now, despite the FDA’s hard-won ban on ephedra, it is perfectly legal to buy ephedrine hydrochloride – an extract of ephedra – over the counter in the US, where it is marketed for sale without prescription as a bronchodilator and nasal decongestant. The only restriction on its sale is that it must be presented in pill form with dosage not exceeding 8mg, and the label cannot promote it as a weight loss aid – a restriction which can be sidestepped with the greatest of ease, as this website, with the in-your-face domain name ephedrinediet.org, vividly demonstrates.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the ephedra case is the only time the FDA has attempted to force the removal of a dangerous supplement from the market. Hamstrung by DSHEA, the FDA can do little more than exert its limited authority over the wording on supplement labels to ensure that manufacturers make no explicit claims that their products may be used prevent, cure or treat a specific disease. However, the lack of seriousness with which an increasingly confident supplement industry takes the FDA and its semantic policing powers is well illustrated by the following statement which appears in a recent report published by the Natural Products Foundation, an industry umbrella and lobbying group:
Healthy consumers use supplements to decrease their risk of heart disease, boost their immune systems, prevent vision loss, build strong bones, or prevent birth defects. Less healthy or ill consumers turn to supplements as an alternative to traditional medical treatments, to either complement prescription drugs they may be taking or substitute supplements for prescription drugs they either cannot afford or do not trust.
There are encouraging signs that concern about the dangers posed by an largely unregulated supplement industry may at last be growing, although industry and grass-roots opposition to attempts to repeal DSHEA have been well organized, well funded and vociferous. Even so, in 2007, largely as a result of public unease over the FDA’s protracted struggle to ban ephedra, DSHEA was amended to make reporting of serious adverse events such as death, life-threatening emergencies, inpatient hospitalizations or significant, persistent incapacities, mandatory. As a result of this amendment, in the first 9 months of 2008 alone, the FDA received almost 600 reports of serious adverse events arising from the use of dietary supplements. Moreover, the FDA believes that adverse events are being seriously under-reported, and that the annual number of supplement-related adverse events in the US is close to 50,000.
Perhaps it will take another ephedra disaster to make us rethink DSHEA, take the handcuffs off the FDA and begin looking more critically at the notion that dietary supplements are intrinsically beneficial and harmless.
In the meantime, here’s the 2013 addendum to Medicine Through the Ages:
2000 A.D. – That antibiotic is unnatural. Here, eat this root.
2013 A.D. – Has that root been assayed for adulterants, standardized for potency and purity? Has that root been approved by the FDA following clinical trials to establish dosage, efficacy and safety? Is the use of that root use evidence-based? Is it safe to take that root concurrently with other roots? Are there any contraindications? My diet already contains roots; will taking more be too much?
