Herbal Toxins?

More angry responses to Britain's Daily Telegraph in response to its article that alternative medicine is the real health scare….

You are wrong to suggest that doctors used to tolerate complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Until quite recently a doctor could be struck off for associating with a CAM practitioner, which explains why patients are still hesitant about telling their GPs what other therapies they are following.

To compare the dangers of medical herbs with mainstream treatments is unwarranted. A leading American medical journal has written: "Each year prescription drugs injure 1.5 million people so severely they require hospitalization and 100,000 die."

The House of Lords Committee inquiry in 2000, on which I served, recommended much more research into alternative medicine. Until that takes place, any statements on its effectiveness will be based on belief or anecdote, not good science.
(Earl) Baldwin of Bewdley, Upper Wolvercote, Oxfordshire

Your leading article says that as many as 70 per cent of British breast cancer patients are "compromising their chances of survival by using alternative remedies which either do not work or are positively harmful" (Opinion, March 21). Obviously an alternative remedy may be an incorrect one, but is it usually only after chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy and possibly surgery that most patients seek alternative answers. Sometimes they should be sought much earlier.

I was diagnosed with reticular blastoma, which affects the lymph system, luckily at an early stage. I was offered chemo/radiotherapy but was given three months to live. I chose instead the Gerson therapy cure, basically a "detoxifying" programme with specific organic food diet, supplements and coffee enemas for a year. That was in 1976.
Hilda Saenz de Deas, BPhil (complementary medicine), Oxford

And this brilliant extract from Booker's ever excellent article 'Kava kava is not a danger'

Doubtless the Food Standards Agency, the Medicines Control Agency and the European Commission will have applauded this newspaper's leading article last week defending their regulatory onslaught on firms making and selling vitamin supplements and health foods. Under the heading, "The real health scare", this singled out the banned kava kava, described as a "South American herbal remedy", as demonstrating the need for tighter regulation.

I am not sure how closely the editorial was based on examining the evidence, but for a start kava kava is not South American but a herb of Polynesian origin, now drunk as a relaxing infusion by millions of people all over the world. Despite the claim that it can cause "severe liver damage", the case adduced for banning it, as I wrote here last year, is "so flimsy as to be a parody of science".

Our regulators cited 70 "possible" or "probable" cases of adverse reaction associated with kava kava worldwide, four supposedly fatal. One of these involved an 86-year-old American who died in his sleep after drinking a cocktail of herbs, one of which was kava kava. It then turned out that he was a diabetic with severe heart problems and under heavy medication. The other claimed "fatalities" were similarly dubious. None was in the UK.

Yet on these grounds the MCA bizarrely claims that the ban will prevent "one UK-based death per annum", saving "£1.4 million" a year. What makes this even odder is that the same MCA that wishes to ban kava kava happily permits the continued sale of many pharmaceutical products which cause genuine health damage, such as the non-prescription painkillers which account for 2,000 deaths a year.

In the name of consistency, this newspaper should call for a ban on products which are infinitely more dangerous, such as paracetamol, alcohol, tobacco and peanuts (which kill six people every year). Alas, it is easier for the media to join in promoting health scares than to see through the woolly thinking that usually lies behind them.
Sunday Telegraph 28th March 2004