Buchu tea for your babalaas? Sorry, Baba, it’s a controlled substance, I can’t sell it to you. You want lavender oil to help you relax? Do you have a prescription, Ma’am?
That scenario sounds ludicrous, but amendments to the Medicines Control Act, due to be implemented in the next few months, could spell the end of the R2-billion alternative-health industry. If the amendments are carried as they now stand, you will need a doctor’s prescription to buy any herbal, homeopathic or nutritional supplement that has a therapeutic effect — and only after these have undergone strict trials, the cost of which is likely to bankrupt many producers. They will also need to be produced and sold by pharmacists only. This broad definition includes multi-vitamins, traditional African medicine, spirulina and, if the law is interpreted strictly, chamomile tea. Yet you will still be able to buy painkillers, which can kill you, from a supermarket.
This, we are told, is for our protection. But in the United States, a country where a wide range of alternative remedies is used, there are only five confirmed cases of people who have died from natural remedies. Three of these have been athletes using massive doses of the Chinese herb Ma Huang — a natural source of ephedrine — to boost performance while sick and against medical advice. The other two deaths are attributed to a powerful muscle relaxant, kava kava, which is known to increase liver damage in people with cirrhosis. But the two people who died were also taking a cocktail of pharmaceuticals, so it is not clear what caused their deaths.
At the same time, according to the American Medical Association, correct use of pharmaceutical products is the fourth biggest cause of death in the US. That is not people overdosing, or taking incongruous cocktails of drugs they have put together themselves. That is people who have gone to see their doctor, got a prescription, and died as a result of the medicines they took. So who needs protection from alternative remedies? Consumers? Or Big Pharma, which seems threatened by people taking responsibility for their health and supplementing intelligently?
Many people feel that the pharmaceutical industry has a vested interest in keeping people sick and hooked on their products. Big Pharma’s wet dream is manageable syndromes, like Aids, where “clients” have to take their product daily for the rest of their lives. Healing people would break our dependence on their chemical snake oils and seriously hurt the bottom line. And Big Pharma hates herbal remedies because, usually, you can’t patent a plant. They do try, though.
Many health store owners and people working in the industry feel the influence of pharmaceutical multinationals on our Medicines Control Council and also feel it is the éminence grise behind Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s signing of the amendments. Originally due to be implemented in October this year the legislation has been sent back to the drawing board by a campaign to collect a million signatures from sangomas, producers of alternative products, health store owners and other healers.
There clearly are alternative remedies that are dangerous and should be taken off the market. Some companies spend more money on marketing than on quality control and, as a result, are unfortunately the most visible face of the alternative-health industry for a lot of people.
The late night infomercials selling panaceas need to be strictly monitored. A perfect example is a certain “fat blocker”. The advertisements claim you can eat like a pig and look like a supermodel, because the product inhibits the body’s absorption of fat. Quite apart from the obscenity of buying a pill to stop you absorbing your food in a country where people are starving, the product is dangerous. Fat is an important part of the diet, and prolonged use of the product could cause a serious deficiency — the most noticeable symptom of which is depression, which is likely to contribute to another bout of binge eating and lock the user in a negative cycle.
But for the most part, it’s a question of making sure false advertising claims aren’t being made. Since no one is dying from these products, why the need to take such a strict approach?
Dangerous products need to be regulated. But the medical establishment is not qualified to judge paradigms it doesn’t understand — what do pharmacists know about homeopathy? The best way to regulate these products would be to submit them to a peer review by a representative council of alternative healers.
Surely, in working for a healthier country, the sensible thing is to use everything at our disposal, and not restrict ourselves to a medical paradigm that so often fails to heal us. Western medicine is very important for health and is particularly effective in trauma situations and medical emergencies. But we need to realise that it can not cure everything, and that the first rule of medicine is “first, do no harm”.
There is no such thing as a miracle cure or wonder pill. The alternative- health industry has certainly reached the critical mass where it needs to take itself (and be taken) seriously, to weed out the opportunists and provide people with good, clear information.
The role of complementary medicines is to keep people healthy, to educate them about their bodies, to stop minor problems from becoming worse. The role of Western medicine is to save lives when a situation is too far gone to be healed by lavender oil and a vitamin pill. Working together, this approach could dramatically improve health for all of us.