Comments on: Quacks, charlatans and witch doctors

By: loretta

loretta — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:27:22 +0000

Following a six month project run by the Mater Hospital/Bond Uni/UofQ, the National Prescribing Service (NPS) identified a number of high quality complementary resources to provide information suitable for both consumers and health practitioners. The project was a real team effort which included doctors, pharmacists, naturopaths and consumers working together (NPS media release 16 March 2009 – ‘Highest quality complementary medicines resources identified’).

There has been an enormous number of high quality clinical trails completed worldwide by independent groups (including universities and hospitals) and these complementary resources are up to date and give the ‘bottom line’ recommendations on thousands of products.

I am unaware of any ‘nutritional cancer treatments’ that are as ‘successful as conventional treatments’, although I do know that a number of chemotherapy drugs, for example, come from the bark and needles of the Yew tree.

Loretta

By: jonathan benham

jonathan benham — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:53:48 +0000

what was the purpose of crikey publishing such wacky article in the first place??? This right wing bunk belongs elsewhere, say the Oz paper perhaps? When are we going to have a real debate about this issue, no more of this big pharma and troglodyte oncologist fueled hysteria! Nutritional cancer treatments would appear to be at least as successful and much cheaper than the current drug therapies. this article deliberately manipulated the facts with comments to follow that are surely part of the same press release they came from. how about working together to save more lives, oh sorry I forgot you can’t patent natural substances there is no profit in it, is there?

By: Peter Hogan

Peter Hogan — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:17:25 +0000

It is amazing how these charlatans can get away with their unscrupulous practices. We need more people like Loretta Marron exposing this stuff.
Peter H

By: Clive Deverall

Clive Deverall — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:24:34 +0000

There’s a fine line between unproven/alternative or complementary medicine and what some GPs provide as self-christened ‘Integrative Medicine’. This a nice little earner for many orthodox doctors whereby the initial consult is partly covered by Medicare (depends on the ‘gap’ amount) at which a spectrum of tests is recommended covering hair, nails, sputum, blood and sometimes urine. Thereafter, a range of nutritional supplements are suggested and ‘how convenient’- they are often available direct from the doctor’s rooms. That’s several hundred dollars so far. The test results are to put it conservatively - complex and, of course, require the Integrative Medical Practitioner(IMP) to interpret them. They provide the ‘interpretation’ which, almost without fail, provides the threshold for recommending the purchase of their nutritional products.Most of them do all this on the basis of one or two day courses. Many of the ‘worried’ well are their ‘patients’ anxious to reduce their risk of various chronic diseases; others, of course, have chronic diseases including cancer. Yes- registration is important for naturopaths but, at the same time, what about what is already buried in general practice and partly feeding off Medicare? There is no oversight of Integrative Medical Practitioners in terms of the ‘pedigree’ of their qualification and continuing education. Even more importantly there is no-one to check what products they are selling.