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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16078

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Harvey KJ.
A review of proposals to reform the regulation of complementary medicine
Aust Health Rev. 2009 May; 33:(2):279-87
http://www.aushealthreview.com.au/publications/articles/issues/ahr_33_2_0509/ahr_33_2_279.html


Abstract:

In 2003, the Therapeutic Goods Administration instituted a major recall of products made by Pan Pharmaceuticals Limited. Later that year, an expert committee produced 49 recommendations for complementary medicines reform, many of which were to be implemented by the proposed Australia New Zealand Therapeutic Products Authority (ANZTPA). In 2008, the Pan Pharmaceuticals affair reached some conclusion in the courts, the ANZTPA had been abandoned and the case for reform had intensified. There was widespread and increasing use of complementary medicines yet consumers were often unaware that, unlike conventional medicines, these medicines were not evaluated for efficacy. The justification of this two-tiered regulatory system was that complementary medicines are relatively low-risk products. However low risk does not mean no risk. A number of consumers have been shown to use these products for conditions where there is no evidence of effect, potentially placing them at risk. In addition, promotion often overstates their benefits while minimising and sometimes denying known adverse effects and drug interactions. Complaint procedures are overloaded and the “sanctions” available do not deter repeat offenders. A number of regulatory reforms have been suggested to overcome these problems; they are reviewed in this paper.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909