Europe to ban hundreds of natural remedies in UK next year
It's strange how you can remember exactly what you were doing when something incredibly important happens. I was only 4 when John Kennedy was shot - but I remember where I was and what I was doing. The same with when Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon and when the Challenger blew up.
I remember a time, just over 7 years ago, when I was driving in the car and heard a news bulletin stating that a natural therapies producer called Pan Pharmaceuticals had been forced to close and all of their products were ordered to be removed from shelves due to certain 'irregularities' in some of their manufacturing procedures. Pan was one of the largest manufacturers of natural therapies in the world though they did have a small number of drug based products as well. The reason for the recall in 2003 was because of several reactions to one of these drug-based products - a travel sickness treatment called Travacalm.
Did hundreds of people die due to Travacalm? Did it cause a massive outbreak killing and permanently injuring thousands before our heroes at the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) charged in on their white horses to save us all?
Not at all.
A total of 87 Travacalm reactions were reported to the TGA (a drug remember, not a natural remedy) and 19 of those 87 required hospitalisation though there were no deaths.
Now do I think that it is acceptable to have 87 people react to a treatment? Absolutely not! Any reactions are too many as far as I'm concerned.
But whilst 19,000 Australians are known to die every year in the public hospital system alone due to adverse reactions to properly prescribed medications whilst the TGA does nothing (this is not the figure for medical error nor does it include reactions that occur in the public hospital system or from drugs that were prescribed by doctors in their surgeries), it did seem a bit over the top for them to react in this way to a situation where 87 people had reactions - 19 of them serious enough to require hospitalisation but no deaths.
But wait - it got worse! Because of the reactions to Travacalm, the TGA forced all stores and practitioners to remove any products made by Pan Pharmaceuticals from their shelves and shut the company down. Did they test the other products that Pan produced to see if there were any problems with them? No, they didn't. Did they have a large number of adverse reactions reported to Pan's other products - the bulk of which were natural remedies, not drugs? Again, they did not.
In fact, they had no evidence of harm at the time they used the equivalent of a nuclear bomb to wipe out an ant colony.
This action caused Pan's shareholders to lose more than $350 million (the lawsuit against the TGA by Pan shareholders is still ongoing) and Jim Selim, Pan's founder and CEO won an award of $55 million against the TGA in 2008 because of the wrongful closure. He might have held out for more, but he was dying of cancer at the time. No doubt the stress from having his life's work destroyed played a role in his ill health.
It took years for the natural therapies industry to recover from this debacle that cost the government $55 million and will end up costing them much more by the time the shareholder's cases are heard in court.
This was such an obvious stitch-up it was hard for me to imagine that everyone couldn't see it! When the evidence of harm from Western medicine is so great and the evidence of safety for natural remedies has been established - in some cases - for thousands of years - anyone with a bit of perspective should have seen that this was not an attempt to protect the Australian population but rather, a cynical exercise in protecting the status quo of drug-based procedures which are worth tens of billions of dollars and which had been threatened by the small but growing acceptance of natural health products and procedures. After all, the last thing the drug companies want is a healthy population that doesn't need their products!
Why do I refer to Pan now? Well as the saying goes - those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
And repeat them, it seems we have. So I wanted to put this reminder here before linking to the article below. An article that takes the Happy out of New Year because it seems that what started out on a small scale in Australia just 7 years ago is now being tested in a far bigger venue - the European Union.
The vast majority of herbal products will no longer be available for sale over the counter. I haven't yet seen the list of what herbs will be affected, but according to the article, they will number in the hundreds. So people may no longer have the ability to go to their local health food store or chemist's shop and purchase (for instance) Astragalus for their circulation and failing memory; or Gingko Biloba for its many benefits to the heart, circulatory system, hearing and mind. Instead, most health food stores will probably be forced to close due to the overnight loss of a huge percentage of their income and, since the practitioners who can sell these products will have to be 'registered' and that registration will be prohibitively expensive, this is nothing more than a back-door way to shut down the natural therapies industry.
Let's take a step back and look at this from another angle. There are many who will say that all products must be proven through thorough testing to be both safe and effective prior to being used. I agree. But less than 20% - perhaps as little as 15% of Western medical drugs and procedures have ever been shown to be either safe or effective through independent and accurate clinical testing. So do we have a double standard whereby drugs and Western medicines are assumed to be safe and effective whilst natural therapies are assumed to be unsafe and ineffective?
How many natural products have been shown to be unsafe - findings which have led to this draconian move to restrict their sale?
Click here to view the list of natural therapy products for which warnings have been issued. There are a total of 10 in the past 2 years. Now, as I said earlier, even 1 is too many. But let's look a bit closer. What are these products for which warnings have been issued?
These warnings seem to fall into 3 categories:
Herbal 'viagra' products - most natural therapists would not call these herbal remedies and in fact, the reason for the withdrawl in every case that I saw was due to their containing drugs rather than herbs.
Herbal slimming products - ditto what I said above for the herbal 'viagra'
Vague warnings about the dangers of sourcing herbs from overseas manufacturers which haven't been regulated by British and European authorities.
There were no deaths reported in the UK from any of these products (one of these warnings lists one death in the US - a nation that lists over 900,000 deaths each year from adverse reactions to Western medical drugs and medical error)
Now, let's look at the warnings for drugs and Western medical treatments and procedures which you can see by clicking here.
In the same time period when there were a total of 10 warnings against products which claimed to be natural therapies with no deaths reported, there were 443 warnings against drugs and medical procedures - many of which include multiple reports of death following their administration.
What is happening here? Are the authorities really performing their duty of care to protect the citizens of the UK against dangerous and unproven therapies or, as appears to be the case to me at least, are they simply targeting a safe, time-tested and effective range of treatments in favour of those that are neither safe, effective, nor proven?
If you are a natural therapies practitioner, what are you going to do about this? Are you going to wait until your industry has been shut down like Pan Pharmaceuticals was shut down? Or will you start taking action as of today! Will you be writing to your associations and asking them what they will be doing to protect your livelihood and the livelihood of others who practice natural medicine? Will you be speaking with your clients and customers (in the case of health food shops) to alert them to these dangers and to start asking them to take action as well?
If you are a healthcare consumer, will you be contacting your natural therapists and letting them know about these actions which may be taking place in the UK but which are slated to happen in Australia as well? Will you protect your rights and the rights of your children and grandchildren by asking your elected representatives where they stand on the issue of our right to choose natural therapies without interference from the TGA or will you wait until this is a done deal and you no longer have any rights in relation to your health?
The choice is yours. (Please see the links below the article for contact details for federal and state representatives)
Europe to ban hundreds of natural remedies in UK next year
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1342747/Herbal-drug-crackdown-Europe-ban-hundreds-natural-remedies-year.html
Patients are set to lose access to hundreds of herbal medicines next year, as European regulations come into force.
Sales of all herbal remedies, except for a small number of popular products for 'mild' illness such as echinacea for colds, will be banned to the public from May 1.
Under the new law traditional products must be licensed or prescribed by a registered herbal practitioner.
Almost 2,500 UK qualified herbalists and Chinese medicine practitioners will lose the right to supply a wide range of herbal medicines, because they are not signed up to the statutory regulation scheme.
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