BMJ 2001;322:158-160 ( 20 January )

Education and debate

Regulation in complementary and alternative medicine

Simon Y Mills, research coordinator. 

Complementary Health Studies Programme, Department of Lifelong Learning, School of Education, Exeter EX1 2LU

S.Y.Mills@exeter.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Complementary and alternative therapies have become more widely used over the past two decades, but many practitioners in the United Kingdom are largely unregulated. One of the recommendations of last year's report on complementary and alternative medicine by the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology was that "in order to protect the public, professions with more than one regulatory body make a concerted effort to bring their various bodies together and to develop a clear professional structure."¹ That some health professions remain unregulated in a developed country seems extraordinary, and I shall review how this situation has arisen before considering the prospects for change.

In the United Kingdom the common law right to choose one's own treatment for illness has been barely constrained by law.² It is thus legal for practitioners to set themselves up in a wide variety of healthcare professions, as long as they do . . . [Full text of this article]

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