This is an article about Simon Singh, but more than that about the wider issues at stake. In recent months I've written about the BPS, BACP, GCC, BCA, CNHC, and other unimaginative groups of letters that act as regulators or professional bodies for auxilliary health industries in Britain. Simon Singh's battle against the BCA is one chapter in a broader story that links all these cases together. In this post, I want to take a step back, and explore that wider story.
There are four distinct but related stories that have bubbled along for months now (among many others). The CNHC ('OfQuack') are a hapless alternative medicine "regulator" set up by an alt med charity run by Prince Charles at considerable expense to the taxpayer.
The BCA and GCC are chiropractic regulators now 'dealing' with intense scrutiny of an industry in which the truth is systematically distorted after the BCA's misconceived libel action against Simon Singh.
The BPS may be new to many of you, but made themselves a target of my writing after their point-blank refusal to address concerns about psychologists "diagnosing" people in the media. Blogger Gimpy has touched on a similar story with the BACP and Derek Draper.
And finally we have the Homeopathic Action Trust and Society of Homeopaths, the target of brilliant investigative journalism by Gimpy, who have refused to deal with the reckless actions of Jeremy Sherr in Africa.
These stories all share the same elements: threats and legal shenanigans; obfuscation and deception; ineffective self-regulation; the potential endangerment of public health; and bewildering government actions. I'll deal with these in turn.
The first thing to note is that writing about these organisations is hard, and has in fact been rather risky. The Times ended up vetoing an article I wrote for them about the BCA's "plethora" of evidence on legal grounds. My recent piece for the Guardian about the British Psychological Society was published after considerable scrutiny by the paper's legal team. Bloggers writing about these issues have more freedom from editors, but still risk libel, or contempt of court.
This chilling effect is largely due to the actions of the BCA, but other groups have made threats - notably the CNHC's bizarre open letter to a "Mr. Smith". While these threats have if anything encouraged the blogosphere to write more, they may have helped to dampen criticism of these groups in the mainstream media.
The second element is the failure of these groups to be open and honest. The BPS refused point-blank to answer my questions about psychologists flouting their guidelines; the CNHC have been almost comically inept in their backpedaling over the release of minutes from their meetings and subsequent attempts to rewrite history; the BCA took a year to release a dodgy dossier of evidence that on closer examination suggested they were either ignorant or deliberately misleading people. In each of these cases, investigation was hampered by a culture of secrecy, reluctant cooperation, and distortion of the truth.
The third is that in these cases, health workers are quite simply running amok. The chiropractic industry was thrown into chaos as soon as mass complaints were made; homeopaths are galavanting across Africa claiming to cure AIDS, psychologists are busy diagnosing celebrities in the media, and the CNHC's version of regulation does not include any requirement that the treatments used by its members can actually be shown to work. Worse than that, the professional bodies and regulators themselves provide some of the worst examples of bad behaviour.
The one place where a line could be drawn is in government, but here we find chaos and confusion. The CNHC have sucked in hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money to support their struggling enterprise, with little explanation from the Department of Health to justify this outlay. The legal system is skewed heavily in favour of these groups, dampening criticism of bodies which have a critical role to play in public health. The policies of individual parties on alternative medicine regulation range from decent (LibDems) to mind-boggling insanity (Greens), but the two main parties appear to have no coherent policy on the subject at all.
I believe that the lack of any coherent, consisent policy for the regulation of alternative and complementary medicine is precisely what is allowing the present situation to continue, exacerbated by the horrendously biased legal system that journalists and writers have to contend with.
It makes no sense at all that alternative "medicine" is not subjected to the same rigorous regulation as normal medical practice. Either the treatments have a clinical effect, or they don't. If they do, they should be dealt with like any other drug. If they don't, they are a fraud and should be removed from sale.
Sense About Science are using current events to campaign for a reform of libel law; but while this is a worthwhile thing to do, there's another fight to be had in Westminster. I suspect that the lack of policy in this area is simply due to the fact that MPs haven't been made to think about this issue before. Maybe it's about time we prompted them. And with new initiatives like the Westminster branch of Skeptics in the Pub coming in the near future, perhaps we will.
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