Criticism
"How does a regulator decide what is good practice and what is charlatanry when none of it has peer-reviewed, scientific evidence that it works?... Professor Michael Baum protested that 'this is like licensing a witches' brew as a medicine so long as the batwings are sterile'... It matters that Newsnight found homeopaths advising patients visiting malaria areas not to take anti-malarial drugs. And that patients are told not to give their children the MMR jab." Polly Toynbee, The Guardian.
Private Eye magazine argued that the council had a conflict of interests between promoting and regulating alternative medicine: "Everyone would say that propagandists cannot be regulators because they cannot be trusted to act in the public interest." It quoted Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, as saying: "This is ridiculous. It really is a farce. All they will need to prove is that are following an established technique they believe to be appropriate. It's a ludicrous system."
Private Eye and The Economist reported that critics have nicknamed the council 'OfQuack'. Private Eye quoted a joke slogan, 'OfQuack - making quacks look professional since 2008'.
In January 2009, an online petition was started at the UK Government Petition website, asking for stricter requirements on efficacy and safety as a condition of certification. An official response to this was posted, but simply reiterated the terms of the current requirements. However, in response to the point made by the petitioners and others, the CNHC has now amended its website, deleting its original statement that regulation by them gives a guarantee of the efficacy of the procedures carried out by their registrants.
In addition to the medical criticism, CNHC have also been censured by the British Standards Institute for use of their trademarked term "kitemark", and have also been criticised for poor openness and an inconsistent approach to data protection.
There is a Twitter feed from OfQuack, an obvious parody as it has been described as "puerile and sarcastic", and occasionally refers to the CNHC separately from itself.
Read more about this topic: Complementary And Natural Healthcare Council
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)