‘Regulate us’ say herbalists after toxic pills case

Mainstream herbalists have slammed the government for its inaction over protecting the public against dangerous alternative remedies. They have renewed their call for regulation after an unqualified Chinese herbal practitioner, who sold a toxic substance to a woman who later developed cancer, escaped a jail sentence yesterday.
 
Ying 'Susan' Wu sold pills containing Aristolochia fangchi to Patricia Booth, a civil servant who went to Wu's shop complaining of spots on her face. The substance, which was later banned because it produces an acid that is toxic to the kidneys, should only have been given under prescription, which Wu was not authorised to do.

Booth took the pills, which she bought at the Chinese Herbal Medical Centre in Chelmsford, Essex, for five years until the shop closed in 2003. She later developed cancer of the urinary tract and kidney failure.

Wu pleaded guilty to selling prescription-only medicines without authorisation and to selling a banned substance. But a more serious charge of "administering a noxious substance so as to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm" was thrown out by the judge largely because Wu did not know the potential harm that the pills she sold could cause.

Judge Jeremy Roberts told Wu: "Everybody accepts that you didn't know you were breaking the law." Though he said he was "concerned" that Wu was presenting herself as "knowing rather more about these medicines than you did" he let her off with a two-year conditional discharge.

The fact that the practitioner knew nothing of the dangers of the herb she was selling has been seized upon by registered herbalists desperate for the government to institute a regime of statutory regulation on Chinese and traditional medicines.

Nick Lampert, ex-president of the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine, told The First Post: "[Wu] got off lightly in a way... I would say she had no excuse for not knowing that the pill she was prescribing contained a very risky ingredient."
 
Lampert believes Wu's case strengthens the argument in favour of regulation, since members of a register would have to purchase their herbs from licensed suppliers and would be trained to an appropriate standard: it might not stop rogue practitioners from prescribing dangerous herbs, but they would not be able to say, as Mrs Wu did, that they did not know they were breaking the law.

"Ethical rules and discipline would be imposed by the equivalent of the General Medical Council, and anyone who was thrown out would lose the possibility of practising," he said.

But regulation in the future is by no means certain, partly because influential lobbyists are against it. The Royal College of Physicians, for example, believes that regulation might encourage the public to take alternative medicine too seriously. "The vast majority of herbal and traditional Chinese medication is not based on scientific evidence of efficacy," the RCP believes. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and the Medical Schools Council are also against.

It's a situation that leaves Michael McIntyre, chairman of the European Herbal and Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association, fuming. "It beggars belief that they [the government] are content to place lives at risk because of its abject failure to provide statutory regulation of herbal medicine practitioners," he said. ·