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(my PGP key, and you can get PGP from here)
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But an Old Bailey judge ruled that, as the sale of traditional Chinese medicines was totally unregulated, there was no evidence that she knew of the potential harm. A charge of "administering a noxious substance so as to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm" was therefore thrown out.That seems a strange ruling. Selling bottles of poisonous "medicine" is okay as long as you don't bother to find out what it is?
"Everybody accepts that you didn't know you were breaking the law," he told Ms Wu.
The Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine, which represents more than 450 practitioners, said the case highlighted "the urgent need for the statutory regulation of herbal medicine in the UK".Well... sort of. What is not needed is some new and different way of regulating herbal medicines and herbalists. What is needed is for people who want to diagnose diseases and prescribe drugs, or people who want to dispense those drugs, to train as doctors or pharmacists; professions which already have statutory regulation. And what is also needed is to treat herbal medicines for what they are; they are drugs, so should be subject to the same standards of testing for efficacy and safety as anything a modern pharmaceutical company might produce. Drugs are drugs, whether they're traditional, Chinese, herbal, or modern or western. They have effects and benefits, and they have side effects and dangers, so regulate them all as medicine. The current set-up is absurd. I saw St John's Wort, an antidepressant drug with complex side-effects and interactions with other medications, being sold as a "food supplement" in a health food shop the other weekend. That's like stocking bottles of Prozac on the shelf and labelling it as a "condiment".
I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment. I felt rather proud. I thought, ‘Hang on a moment’. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago. It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions, faced as we are with huge challenges all over the world. It must be apparent to people deep down that we have to do something about it.The Enlightenment: the idea that the universe can be methodically studied, its laws and processes understood, and that the world isn't made of magic. This has been a hugely productive approach which has advanced health and knowledge and happiness enormously. Notice how you're not having to scrape a living out the mud as a subsistence farmer before dying of smallpox? You can thank the Enlightenment for that, with all its sciencey goodness. But Prince Charles thinks it's somehow outdated. And this man gets to meet with members of the government. Hint to members of the government; just smile and nod politely until the old duffer goes away.