Listen/Download [mp3 9MB]

This is the presentation given by Professor David Colquhoun at London Skeptics in the Pub on 19/02/2008. Details of Prof. Colquhoun's talk are below.

David Colquhoun

Regulating Alternative Medicine: Are the Quacks Ducking the Issues?

2008 is going to see a big battle between various groups as to who gets to pretend to regulate alternative therapists. The Government, through Prince Charles’ Foundation for Integrated Health, is setting up The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, a voluntary federal register. The problem is, no one appears to want to join.

Various homoeopaths’ Membership Groups are setting up their own ‘Single Registers’. More fundamentally, no group looking at this issue appears to want to tackle the inconvenient problem that most alternative therapies do no work and their practitioners hold strange and sometimes dangerous beliefs.

David Colquhoun is a pharmacologist at University College London who writes the Improbable Science blog at DC Science.