News Focus: Medicine’s alternatives

Nov 17 2009 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

The EU proposes to outlaw the sale of all herbal medicines except licensed ‘traditional’ herbal remedies for mild and self-limiting illnesses.

This will be law in 2011.

Herbalists argue that some pharmaceutical drugs are based on a single active chemical that has been taken from the plant and then synthesised in a laboratory.

These drugs may have undesirable side-effects.

Herbalists believe that medicines made from the whole plant and containing a ‘soup’ of perhaps hundreds of naturally-occurring chemicals are more gentle and balanced.

For example, thousands of years ago people might not have known that meadowsweet and willow bark contained salicylic acid, an active component of aspirin, yet there is evidence from 6,000-year-old burials that they used them for relieving pain.

The apparent reluctance of the Government to go down the path of accreditation is not just a case of Parliamentary dithering.

There is a strong body of opinion that herbal medicine is beyond the scientific pale. Because of that, its practitioners should never be given the respectability that conventional medicine enjoys.

This could be because herbal medicine has hitched its wagon to other, less-creditable forms of complementary or alternative medicines and techniques.

As such, it was subject to a Department of Health steering group, the Health Professions Council, which failed to locate any ‘evidence of efficacy’ in acupuncture, homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, dowsing, or reiki.

If you give quacks the legitimacy of qualification, you are likely to endanger public health, not enhance it, since more people will go to them rather than seek scientifically- approved treatment methods, the thinking goes.

A study in the US started a decade ago spent $2.5bn on investigating herbal and other alternative medicine claims.

It found that ginger capsules appear to help reduce chemotherapy nausea; acupuncture, yoga and head massage have been recorded as having a beneficial effect, in some instances, on pain, anxiety and fatigue.

Michael Guthrie, Policy Officer with the Health Professions Council, said: “We support the proposal that these professions should be regulated in some way on the grounds of public protection.

“If herbalists were to become regulated, this would mean that only someone who had undertaken an approved training and had met certain standards for proficiency and conduct could be registered and legally prescribe herbal medicines and there would be an independent body to consider complaints and take action to protect the public.”