Placebo labels for CAM products - could it work?

[davidabender]

Placebo labels for CAM products—could it work?

A HealthWatch member e-mailed the Newsletter with this interesting suggestion for how to regulate and label complementary and alternative treatments.

I believe that regulation based on the ‘Evidence basis’ is impossible with CAM treatments. It would be better to enforce clear labeling and promotion of all products and therapies perceived to be in the CAM area (including ‘Food Supplements’) that have not met the modern efficacy criteria with the bold writing, ‘This product/therapy is a PLACEBO and has no proven health benefit’. Any unsafe product could be banned (if a product contained Comfrey for instance) with ease. All CAM products and therapies would be classified at a stroke as a single group ‘perceived health enhancing treatments unlicensed as medicines or treatments’. Then, if a CAM product or therapy wished to become licensed to make claims then it would have no alternative but submit itself to the modern scientific route to achieve that status using appropriate criteria.

I believe funding of studies regarding safety and efficacy of CAM is a waste of resources both financial and human. The absence of patents is just one problem. Meagre profit margins on many CAM therapies and products could never fund the ever increasing demands from regulators of medicinal products. Whilst overall revenue in CAM worldwide may be billions of pounds there are plenty of witchdoctors making only a crust! Wouldn’t it be better if we accepted that most CAM therapies and products are fundamentally placebo and regulate and research accordingly? Perhaps we should concentrate on finding out what makes many such placebos seem so effective to their users before embarking on any more fruitless research into CAM using the evidence based paradigm.

More importantly, authorities should accept that CAM practitioners, therapies and products need to be regulated by reference to a different set of criteria from those of powerful modern medicines. The recently introduced Traditional Herbal Medicines Directive has already spawned a bureaucracy. My suggestion would be to abolish the THMD, class Homoeopathy as CAM and use the money saved to bring CAM into a simple framework of law based on safety and self regulation.

Les Rose, consultant clinical scientist and fellow of the Institute of Clinical Research, comments, “This raises some interesting and radical ideas, but I doubt if it’s workable. Suppliers of CAMs would continue to protest that they do have evidence, so a regulator will still be forced to test the evidence. If legislation along these lines came in, it would create a continuous burden of challenges. I suppose we could insist that to avoid a ‘placebo’ label manufacturers will have to make a case and pay a fee, thus financing the process.”