Regulation of alternative medicine

Because of the uncertain nature of various alternative therapies and the wide variety of claims different practitioners make, alternative medicine has been a source of vigorous debate, even over the definition of "alternative medicine". Dietary supplements, their ingredients, safety, and claims, are a continual source of controversy. In some cases, political issues, mainstream medicine and alternative medicine all collide, such as in cases where synthetic drugs are legal but the herbal sources of the same active chemical are banned.

In other cases, controversy over mainstream medicine causes questions about the nature of a treatment, such as water fluoridation. Alternative medicine and mainstream medicine debates can also spill over into freedom of religion discussions, such as the right to decline lifesaving treatment for one's children because of religious beliefs. Government regulators continue to attempt to find a regulatory balance.

Jurisdiction differs concerning which branches of alternative medicine are legal, which are regulated, and which (if any) are provided by a government-controlled health service or reimbursed by a private health medical insurance company. The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – article 34 (Specific legal obligations) of the General Comment No. 14 (2000) on The right to the highest attainable standard of health – states that

Furthermore, obligations to respect include a State's obligation to refrain from prohibiting or impeding traditional preventive care, healing practices and medicines, from marketing unsafe drugs and from applying coercive medical treatments, unless on an exceptional basis for the treatment of mental illness or the prevention and control of communicable diseases.

Specific implementations of this article are left to member states. Two governments, acting under the laws of their respective countries, maintain websites for public information making a distinction between "alternative medicine" and "complementary medicine". In North America, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) states:

In the British Isles, the National Health Service (England)'s NHS Choices (owned by the Department of Health) states:

As alternative medicine becomes more available in the Western world, and is increasingly incorporated into conventional healthcare systems, there is a growing demand for science-based evidence to verify the efficacy of these treatments. In the regulation of alternative medicine, policy makers largely rely on biomedical approaches to evidence, such as the randomized clinical trial (RCT), which has been embraced as the ‘gold standard’ for assessing the effectiveness of all medicine and medical practices. While undoubtedly a useful scientific tool of analysis, the RCT, in its reductionist nature, can present difficulties in assessing those medicines falling outside of the biomedical framework. The RCT, which only measures a small set of symptoms and effects, diminishes the complexity that is involved in the healing systems of some alternative medicines, such as in homeopathy. Additionally, what constitutes as ‘evidence’ can vary greatly, ranging from the biomedical goal of establishing concrete, statistical results according to scientific criteria to a more holistic approach that examines the effects that a treatment has upon the patient’s overall life experience, including social, cultural, and physical factors. In order to gain a more accurate picture of the true efficacy of alternative medicines, it is necessary to challenge the mainstream, biomedical definition of ‘evidence’ and to move outside of the exclusive use of the RCT in obtaining this evidence. Therefore, it may be useful to consider incorporating other forms of research, such as qualitative and ethnographic studies, in the regulation of alternative medicines. The Formal Case Study (FCS), a systematic, qualitative research technique, has also been suggested as a feasible compromise between biomedical and anthropological approaches in researching alternative medicines.

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Wikipedia