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Regulating fantasies

Thanks for the welcome, and thanks for signing. And yes, I noticed the typo, typically for me, while waiting for the page to reload just after hitting the "submit" button. Sigh.
 
seantellis said:
Here you go

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/CNHCsafety/
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Many thanks for posting the link, Wudang. Only 43 signatures so far, though. Any thoughts for promotion would be gratefully accepted.
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In the hope that it would be published, it might be worth putting the petition link in a comment in the ‘Have your say box’ below this letter in today’s Times:

The question about alternative medicine

The Government needs to make unified decisions on alternative medicine

Sir, We would like to congratulate the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, Professor Michael Harloe, for his principled decision to drop all the university’s programmes associated with complementary medicine within the School of Community, Health Sciences & Social Care. This includes its “homoeopathy in practice” degree.

It is also encouraging that the University of Central Lancashire recently closed its BSc in homoeopathy to new students, and announced a review of all its activities in alternative medicine.

Although universities are now taking sensible actions, government policy in the area of regulation of alternative medicine is in urgent need of revision. Last May the steering group, chaired by Professor Pittilo, recommended to the Department of Health that entry into acupuncture, herbal medicine and traditional Chinese medicine should “normally be through a bachelor degree with honours”. But, in the same month, new regulations on unfair trading came into effect. One of the 31 commercial practices that are in all circumstances considered unfair is “falsely claiming that a product is able to cure illnesses, dysfunction or malformations”. One part of government seeks to endorse unproven and disproved treatments, at the same time as another part makes them illegal.

The reason for this chaotic situation is simple. The Department of Health and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) have consistently failed to grasp the nettle of deciding which treatments work and which don’t. That is the first thing you want to know about any treatment.
Vice-chancellors seem now to be asking the question, and the Government should do so too. The ideal mechanism already exists. The question should be referred to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. That was recommended by a House of Lords report in 2000, and it was recommended again by the Smallwood report in 2005. Now it should be done.

Sir Walter Bodmer
Cancer & Immunogenetics Laboratory, Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford

Professor David Colquhoun
Research Professor of Pharmacology, University College London

Dame Bridget Ogilvie
Visiting Professor at UCL, Past-director of the Wellcome Trust

Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell
MRC Research Professor, University of Manchester


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article5613750.ece
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More on the matter here:
http://dcscience.net/?p=984
 
Wow

Simon Singh (yes, the Simon Singh) signed the petition! If he sees his way to mentioning it somewhere, then we'll see the numbers go up.
 
seantellis said:
Simon Singh (yes, the Simon Singh) signed the petition! If he sees his way to mentioning it somewhere, then we'll see the numbers go up.
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And Rose Shapiro has signed it as well. For those who may be unaware, the second edition of her excellent book, Suckers: How alternative medicine makes fools of us all is due to be published on 5th February 2009:
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/book.htm?command=Search&db=main.txt&eqisbndata=0099522861

It’s also good to see that one or two more UK JREF members have signed the petition. For new readers from the UK, here, once again, is the link to the petition and its details:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/CNHCsafety/
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to require evidence of basic efficacy and safety for licensing by the CNHC.

The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) issues approval certificates to Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine practitioners, but this approval is currently independent of actual evidence of efficacy or safety.

It is likely that practitioners will use CNHC approval to imply efficacy and safety, even though it promises no such thing.

We, the undersigned, therefore petition that the CNHC requirements be tightened to include evidence of efficacy and safety.

Deadline to sign up by: 22 April 2009
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And there’s some good, additional comment here:
Unlike the bodies that oversee doctors and nurses, the CNHC takes no interest in whether its practitioners’ efforts actually work.

-snip-

In the Journal of the Scottish Law Society, Douglas MacLaughlin, a Glaswegian lawyer, points out that consumer-protection laws new in 2008 specifically forbid false claims that a product can cure a disease. This could make life difficult for purveyors of alternative medicine, much of which does not work or has never been tested. That one part of government licenses alternative medicine while another bans its main sales pitch reflects a wider chaos.

Britain simultaneously licenses alternative medicine and outlaws it
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12998201&fsrc=rss
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Mojo said:
I notice that DC is the only signatory who doesn't have a knighthood.

http://dcscience.net/?cat=68 ;)
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:D

Wudang said:
Mods: any chance we could make this a "sticky"?
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Seconded.
 
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It's all about what the people want, so give them what they want. Whether it works in reality or not is beside the point. After all, restricting profits to medicine slows technological development, which slows cures and treatments, which makes everybody worse off than they would be without government health care.

So why be fussy about which fraud the people want the government paying for?






Seriously. Why?
 
Beerina said:
It's all about what the people want, so give them what they want. Whether it works in reality or not is beside the point. After all, restricting profits to medicine slows technological development, which slows cures and treatments, which makes everybody worse off than they would be without government health care.

So why be fussy about which fraud the people want the government paying for?

Seriously. Why?
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Sorry, but you will have to explain this as I am being a bit thick today. I thought health care was all about outcomes.
 
No one's studied the long-term outcome on the order of decades, much less a century or more, of the effect of restricting profit on the slowing of medical tech development, and thus the (potentially and effectively) murderous net effect on the population due to the cumulative delay of cures. A 10% slowdown would amount to being 10 years behind in tech after a century. What's the difference between 2010 and 2000-level tech, in terms of quality and length of life?

We do have overwhelming evidence that general over-intervention can massively slow things in general, so why not look at a particular, and literally life-giving, industry?


Most objections are not scientific, and are basically meme regurgitations (aka "talking points") that are part of the spreading meme's defense mechanisms, ala "God works in mysterious ways" is for religion when faced with the brute fact of God letting babies get microwaved.
 
Beerina said:
No one's studied the long-term outcome on the order of decades, much less a century or more, of the effect of restricting profit on the slowing of medical tech development, and thus the (potentially and effectively) murderous net effect on the population due to the cumulative delay of cures. quote]

The biggest problem with your post is that it assumes that money spent on magic water and hand waving somehow goes to funding medical research. Since the very nature of these quack practices is profoundly anti-research this seems a bit of a leap. Surely, if anything, the opposite holds, that channeling funds through such quacks means funds diverting from actual medical research.
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OK, done it, except that I gave an email address I don't have access to right now so I can't confirm the entry until I get access to a wifi network.

I see Asolepius there, and Yuri Nalyssus, and I think Mojo, and there may be other JREFers whose real-life names I don't know, but there aren't enough. This thread need to be a sticky.

I see my esteemed biochemist colleague Vince Marks (the enzyme king) has signed. But, Douglas Gresham? Not C. S. Lewis's stepson Douglas Gresham? (I can't find another one on Google, but that could simply be because the Narnia connection buries anyone else of the same name.)

Funny, I was checking old emails last night, from people who were following a science fiction saga I was e-publishing about 10 years ago. One series of messages was, I noted, from a "Daniel Radcliffe". I wonder....

Rolfe.
 
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I've signed (well, a virtual signature) the petition, and now I have the satisfaction of seeing my name on a list.
 
On the other hand it is potentialy a way of dealing with the "not one of ours gov" defence that SCAM practictioners are known to fall back on.
 
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