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We're here outside the department of health, as you can see, because the government are
proposing legislation that will regulate traditional practitioners in every way except whether
their medicines are efficacious, or whether they're medically trained. And this is very
confusing for the public. Because it means that if they go to one of
these people, they're not going to have their past medical history, they're going to think
that it's safe when it actually might not be. So, we've got these questionnaires to
hand out to members of the public and if they can answer these four simple questions, like;
An apple a day keeps the....what? Then they will qualify for one of our diplomas in Old
Wives Tales. They can go over here to the table and get a diploma, or even a rosette
if they did really well, and hopefully this will highlight the cause and maybe get the
government to think that maybe this may not be the best idea to bring in these regulations.
[pause] Hi! My name is Jamie McClelland and I'm down
here as part of the Voice of Young Science's School of Old Wives Medicine, and we're giving
out diplomas in Old Wives Medicine today.
The reason why we're doing this is to highlight new government proposals of registration and
regulation of traditional herbal practitioners, and these kinds of traditional practitioners.
They don't have any, erm. This doesn't regulate any medical knowledge, or whether the things
are effective, or not, but does give them the air of respectability of a normal medical
practitioner, and we basically think that if these people are getting the extra regulation,
then so should practitioners of old wives tales. And this is what we're doing today.
So, essentially we're here today just to raise awareness in front of the department of health
about registration of alternative health practitioners in medicine. The proposals are basically to
register them in the same way that medical practitioners are. However, traditional practitioners
don't have any medical training whatsoever, so having them on the same scale as this will
cause lots of confusion. The reason why this was proposed is there's a concern about patient
safety, however these are currently regulated for health and safety, so there's no need
to give these people, essentially, a badge. For which they need no clinical training,
or no medical training. Which will put them at the same stage as doctors, nurses, etcetera.
So we're here today, to basically raise awareness, start our own school in Old Wives Traditional
Medicine which we can hopefully also have registered with the Department of Health and
all our practitioners can have a nice sign outside their door even though none of them
are medically qualified.
So, Evan, can you tell us a bit about why we're here today and what you're doing?
>>We're here - although this is obviously a stunt – to make a serious point, that
you can't allow people who don't practice evidence based medicine; who practice irrational
medicine, to have the imprimatur [endorsement] of professional regulation that will make
the public think that they're regulated at tightly as doctors and nurses. Doctors and
nurses, first and foremost, have to practice efficacious medicine, they're not allowed
to treat their patients with things that they know not to be more effective than placebo,
or even things that they irrationally believe to be more effective than placebo. Where as
what's proposed for practitioners of alternative medicine is a compete let-out on that, and
that means that there will be no identifiable benefits to the treatment and only the risks.
Risks like; the misdiagnosis of disease by people who aren't trained in medicine. The
patients might abandon rational effective medicine in favour of what they're doing here.
Or there maybe part of a trend in society to not cherish the decades of work that have
gone into providing evidence for interventions in healthcare.