Intent is very important to our justice system, as it should be… It’s right that judges take this into account in deciding what’s the best outcome for those involved and society; Locking people up for honest mistakes is rarely going to help anyone, as those mistakes are not going to be made again. Ignorance of the law is not the same as strongly believing the consequences of your actions would be beneficial and not detrimental,

A tragedy certainly, and regulation is needed, even if it’s just the improved application of regulation that already exists in regards to health claims and dangerous substances, but in my opinion, revenge is not the answer…

MHRA pronounces on the safety and efficacy of medicines, i.e. the risk:benefit ratio of taking them. NICE decides whether they represent value for money and therefore whether, however good they are, you and I should be allowed to have them on the NHS.

I think this case stinks. Imagine the makers of thalidomide or Vioxx being able to get a conditional discharge on the basis that they have poisoned somebody but didn’t know what they were doing.

It’s one rule for scientifically researched medical treatment, and another rule for woo.

Re Homeopatist being safe
“As long a they don’t prescribe too many sugar pills to a diabetic patient they should be pretty safe!”

They can never give too many as the sugar contained is not diluted, ie 100% pure, and therefore would have no effect on a diabetic unless they actually failed to take one that was proscribed….

It begins by introducing Western medicine as though it has remained completely unchanged since Aristotle, and continues by assigning a whole host of unmerited “philosophical” meanings to various permutations of Yin and Yang – essentially telling us nothing more than 2^3=8 and (2^3)^2 = 64. It has several references for its philosophical underpinnings, though alarmingly little in the way of evidential citations.

Overall, it is what Douglas Adams might call “mostly harmless”, with no references to life-threatening diseases such as malaria, HIV or cancer (though that also means no explicit instruction to refer the patient immediately to a GP either). A couple of features did stand out as alarming though. Firstly, the only part of the text referring to vaccines suggests (with no evidence) a whole load of spurious links of vaccination with diseases such as autism (and the other usual candidates). Secondly, the section on diagnosis advises the reader to actively disregard the process of “cause and effect” and instead look for “patterns” – in other words, to rely on correlation rather than causation and to completely disregard confounding factors. This is where the book ceases to be a harmless, if boring, work of fiction and the implications of its advice begin to get more serious, especially given its de facto place as a standard “Chinese Medicine 101 and handy reference” book.

Claims such as ‘you can’t literally interpret the teaching of Chinese Medical Tradition’ and ‘the two traditions stem from a fundamentally different logic base’ are all well and good; hell, they may even be true. It may well be that [the translation of] ‘spleen’, say, does not in fact mean ‘the spleen’. Many disciplines have their own language, their own terminology and so on.

But… at heart, and setting aside the psychosomatic aspects to illness (which any established and trusted medical tradition can alleviate through a meaning effect)alternative medical practices still deal with the corporeal body. When you treat an injury, or a viral disease, or a bacterial infection you are dealing with a physical problem. When you prescribe a medicine, you are providing the patient with chemical compounds they might not otherwise be exposed to. And so on. I see no reason that these physical interventions cannot be described in terms comprehensible to someone utterly ignorant of the ‘alternative’ tradition involved.

You can say that an apparent claim such as “Sin Jiao assists the Lungs ‘dispersing function’, spreading fluids to skin in form of fine mist or vapour (so it helps regulate fluid production…)” is not as silly as it sounds because ”you can’t literally interpret the teaching of Chinese Medical Tradition’. Fair enough. But what does such a claim actually mean then – in terms a Western-educated person can understand? How can this be rephrased as a testable claim about the body? We’re may be dealing with a different ‘logic base’, but it’s the same human body with the same organs!

You also wrote:
“I think your sweeping generalisation about ‘Asians’ is surely based on terrible research…to make such statments on the back of knowing some Asian people is hardly going to pass muster on this site!”

You are addressing you comment to someone who has stated that they are Asian (not someone who might have met someone who knows someone’s mother’s father-in-law!) and that their grandfather was an acupuncturist who used “toxic” western medicine. There seems to be so much of Actuary’s excellent post that you haven’t bothered to read, or simply don’t understand.

If I may say so it’s your own ramblings that don’t pass muster…

The British taxpayer then says, “By the way, what is it that you’re actually teaching in these classes?” and the university says, “It’s a secret,” or maybe “We just pay the instructors; we never bothered to figure out what they’re teaching.””

There is a slight problem with this tack: if alternative medicine teaching materials are going to be subject to FoI then so are all teaching materials at university level.

These teaching materials are produced by academics – while universities would love to make academics produce easy-to-deliver teaching materials as part of their contract of employment, and then hand over those materials to contracted non-academic teaching staff, to save academic salaries, teaching materials are the IP of the academic staff that produce them. In general it’s not standard practice in academia to make teaching materials freely available.

Academic staff are the teachers of the students on their courses who have themselves, or their sponsors, paid their course fees – they are not teachers of students at other institutions nor of the general public. If all academics are required to give their teaching materials to anyone who asks, they won’t be able to work those materials up into a book or prevent the university from making them redundant once they’ve created a course.

Rather, since all degree level courses are accredited by a university and (should be) subject to external review and external examination, it’s the degree awarding bodies that should be scrutinised – degrees that are not rigorously taught and examined should be removed from the books of the university – where it’s not possible to teach something at degree level (or not possible yet, or the material should properly be part of another degree – so the herbs in Chinese medicine do have active ingredients, clearly, and when more is understood they’ll be part of a pharmacology or toxicology course) then that degree should be removed from the books.

I love this site. Its full of loony’s coming up with all sorts of pseudoscience with an intensity only seen emenating from those with psychological disorders. Treat yourself to a peruse!

I don’t know if its funny or worrying that the founder is apparently an Open University lecturer.

Jonathan

The British taxpayer forks over an enormous sum of money to these universities to run ‘alternative medicine’ programs.

The British taxpayer then says, “By the way, what is it that you’re actually teaching in these classes?” and the university says, “It’s a secret,” or maybe “We just pay the instructors; we never bothered to figure out what they’re teaching.”

To which the British taxpayer replies, “Oh, well, that’s fine, then” instead of the more rational response, which I suggest would sound a lot more like:

“So — for all I know — you could be telling them to sacrifice chickens during a full moon, and you expect ME to keep PAYING for that? Fat chance, guys. I’m canceling those checks.”

An excellent discussion. One in which I am sure many holistic practitioners would not engage. Too bad.

Yes, Ben quite ignorant. You must read these amazing works. Also recommended: “The symptom that has no pathophysiology.” “The cure to which no patient is seeking.” “The healer who receives psychosurgery from the patient’s brain waves.” “The vital sign that does not indicate some parameter of vitality.” “The influence of the remote stars upon your personality.” “How I received the donated liver of a chocolate lover, and darned if I don’t like chocolate now.” “Lower-class people have skulls with more pronounced areas of Acquisitiveness, and that is why they steal.” “All is actually nothing, and nothing is actually all, so why is the government trying to redistribute nothingness?.” “We are all one, so give me our money right now.” “What is the sound of one girl shopping?” “Don’t but this book.” And, “How the Elephant Man’s Mother Was Scared By an Elephant When She was Pregnant With Him, Causing His Elephantitis.”

All classics, Dr. Ben. You must read. You sound quite ignorant unless you have read my favorites, and also believe them.

You’re right that “reckless” is relevant to ABH, GBH and the like, but that wasn’t (I understand) the offence charged. In any event, even if it had been and the ‘reckless’ point was made for those offences, they would also have to have shown assault and/or battery (i.e. physical violence or the threat of it). In this case there was no such threat – indeed there was an assurance of no harm.

The offence charged was, I believe, one of the admistering offences. The Offences Against the Person Act 1861 contains two “administration” offences.
Section 23: “Whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously administer to or cause to be administered to be taken by any person any poison or other destructive or noxious thing, so as thereby to endanger the life of such person, or as thereby to inflict upon such person any grievous bodily harm, shall be guilty of an offence.”

And Section 24: “Whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously administer or cause to be administered to or be taken by any other person any poison or other destructive or noxious thing, with intent to injure, aggrieve, or annoy any such person, shall be guilty of [an offence].”

But here the test isn’t recklessness, its whether it was “unlawful” and “malicious”. In this case it appears that it wasn’t malicious as there appears to have been no deliberate evil intent. Recklessness can come into “malicious” but the caselaw generally relates to cases where something untoward was planned but a different and more serious effect occurred. Here nothing untoward was intented, apparently.

An improvement to the law in this respect was suggested in the late 1990′s – presumably it came to nothing or we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

I’m not a lawyer, but I believe under English criminal law the mens rea test for most forms of GBH, ABH or assault is “intentionally or recklessly”. So you don’t need to prove intent if you can show recklessness.

If someone is prescribing a substance without bothering to find out that it’s banned and highly dangerous, that sounds pretty reckless to me.

Thats just not true though is it Ben?

Please show a modicum of journalistic integrity. As you know full well, the Westminster documents that have been much cited were obtained under the Freedom of Information act and despite that fact that they were taken out of context and ridiculed, Westminster have made available the rest of their curriculum. The UClan course is no longer running.

So is Coca-Cola going to sue?

I’m very open to the idea that anyone who wants to provide any form of ‘medicine’ has to have a medical degree from a certified body (and not one bought off the internet like Ben’s dead cat). Once they have this they can go off and learn their speciality. Don’t medical specialists (eg, dentists, surgeons, etc) have to do this? Why should homeopaths, nutritionists, etc get special treatment?

Conventional medicine doctors also have insurance, so Symball’s idea of requiring alternative therapists to hold liability insurance is reasonable. If they want to be judged by conventional medical standards (which they do, despite what they say, why else are they pointing to the ‘trials’ they perform) then they have to meet conventional medical standards.

And to those above who dislike extra regulation, I quite agree. I’d prefer that we didn’t have to introduce regulation to prevent venal, greedy parasites from preying on the weak and vunerable, but if you took that to it’s logical conclusion then we wouldn’t have to outlaw burglary because no-one would do it.

I find it hard to believe that you are a “natural skeptic” when you clearly believe in the “paradigm of TCM”. It is quite simply total rubbish. Any passing success is due to an accidental stumbling upon a potent natural active ingredient NOT a validation of the “paradigm”. To assert anything else is to make a mockery of modern medicine.

When TCM has a huge literature of “Daoist” – drug halflife, metabolic pathway interaction, gene expression effects, quantitative genomics, etc to prop up the mysticism then perhaps serious scientists will sit up and take real notice. Until then the people who can’t do real science will divert attention from the real work by playing “doctor” and sticking needles in energy flow lines… /sigh

Thanks for the info about NICE. Im dissappointed, although not surprised that pharma have infiltrated every aspect of medical existence. However your puritanical approach to evidence based medicine, while providing for a level to which to aspire, is impractical, and discounting all evidence will cause more harm than good.

“Cholesterol apparently causes heart disease and dietary cholesterol raises your ‘bad’ cholesterol fraction according to conventional scientific method”

Since this statement is based on evidence, what really happened was that a hypothesis was created that fitted the results of an original study, whih was then further analysed with larger studies with more statistical power and disproved – Surely the very process of scientific method, no? As stated earlier, you’ll stuggle to find modern medical textbooks advising low fat diets. A quick look in Kumar and Clark (the medical bible for medical students everywhere) reveals the only dietry advice to be to avoid excessive salt intake.

“feel free to explain this to me, while my fingers tap out a mindless rhythm, waiting for your enthusiastic explanation as how your much vaunted scientific method has improved upon this catastrophic failure to admit the wrong-headedness inherent in isolating a molecule that is vital to life and trying to expunge it while caring not at all for the consequence of other substances within the mevalonate metabolic pathway…”

Ah, I’d best let the diabetics know that their being misled in the advice they’ve been given regarding lowering their levels of a crucial component in the kreb cycle.