The News Review:
- Regulate alternative medicine – HPC
- Digging up real medicine
- Alternative Medicine
- A drop of dog’s milk keeps the doctor away
- Iraq returns to its alternative medicine roots
Regulate alternative medicine – HPC
The Press Association
The professions are not currently subject to statutory regulation but the HPC formally recommended a system was introduced to make it easier to ensure people were “meeting standards”. HPC chief executive Marc Seale said: “The HPC has made a recommendation to the Secretary of State for Health advocating the regulation of acupuncturists, medical herbalists and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. “The HPC was set up in order to protect the public and we strongly believe that statutory regulation can more effectively assure that practitioners are meeting standards and are fit to practise. “A Department of Health steering group report in June said regulation was “in the public interest”.
Digging up real medicine
Gauntlet, Canada
Others, defending these people– many of them honestly believing in the good of the remedy– promote these practices in spite of any evidence that they work. Scientific medicines are tested repeatedly and only considered medicine once the method is proven to work substantially better than a placebo or random chance. Alternative medicine (traditional, spiritual, et cetera), includes all methods that fail the controlled double-blind tests that scientific medicine is subjected to or simply don’t produce consistent, repeatable results. Lack of concrete evidence denies scientific status and nothing more. Because of this reasonable and understandable method of inquiry, medicine has distinguished the functional from the false methods over time. Demanding only that it can be shown to work, there are not multiple forms of medicine. If a method from the Far East is shown to do repeatedly what it claims to do, then it is not alternative– it is medicine.
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Alternative Medicine
ScienceBlogs
Today, though, we will specifically examine the nature of medical ethics as they apply to so-called alternative medicine. First, and perhaps most important, I.
A drop of dog’s milk keeps the doctor away
Middlebury Campus (subscription), VT
Hormones making you feel out of synch? A drop of cuttlefish ink will do the trick. Wondering what to get your aunt for Hanukah? Snake venom – the ultimate cure for varicose veins. Homeopathic medicine, one of the many modes of alternative healing arts, is often met with skepticism. But dedicated practitioners such as Sallie Mack of Charlotte, Vt. “Over and over again you see it work and you just think, wow, this is amazing,” said Mack. In a lecture at Ilsley Public Library last Tuesday, Mack discussed the history and current practice of homeopathy at length.
Iraq returns to its alternative medicine roots
USA Today
Insurgents and weapons poured in from neighboring countries. So, too, did illegal pharmaceuticals, says Sayed Kathem Khawasiya, the Ministry of Health’s inspector general. Unlicensed medicine companies and sidewalk stands sprung up around Iraq, selling unregulated drugs from China and elsewhere. Today, 70% of drugs on the Iraqi market are illegal, and one in five are total fakes, such as starch pills pawned off as legitimate antibiotics, Khawasiya says. “The demand for herbal remedies has skyrocketed because of fake pharmacies and counterfeit medicines that don’t work,” says Faris Kadhem, director of the Health Ministry’s herbal medicine center. The government has raided and closed 120 illegal pharmacies across Iraq in the past two months, Khawasiya says. Many more continue to operate, she says.