Introducing The Australian Council Against Health Fraud

Sydney has the best weather in the world, which is why it takes nine pages in the Yellow Pages directory to list all the swimming pool installation companies. The nine pages include several full- and half-page advertisements. The federal government has just announced that it will spend 2.4 billion dollars over the next four years to improve people's access to health care.

To put these statistics into perspective, it also takes nine of the Yellow Pages to list the chiropractors in Sydney, and that's without any full page advertisements. The amount of money to be spent over four years to enhance Medicare is about the same as is spent each year on alternative and unproven medicine in Australia.

There are various industry bodies and consumer deception organisations in Australia which purport to offer a form of self-regulation of the alternative medicine industry. They all claim to be opposed to outright medical fraud, but their actions when the house of cards is threatened tell the truth about their real objectives. An example was the hysterical response to an attempt by the NSW government to set up a committee to investigate the more egregious quackery, where the reaction from the industry was not to encourage the weeding out of dangerous and insane practices but to start immediate ad hominem attacks on anyone who was doing any investigating.

The official reaction to the Pan debacle was not to say that it was good that proper manufacturing standards should be applied to all therapeutic products, but to represent the issue as an attack on all non-conventional medicine. The reaction to a recent suggestion of industry regulation was to claim that asking suppliers to provide evidence that their products worked would destroy the industry. Laws and regulations requiring truthful labelling and advertising have been resisted because of the inconvenience it would cause to people who want to be able to sell snake oil without restrictions.

A spokesperson for an alternative medicine association, which claims to want only the best for consumers, has stated that she was unaware of the advertisements for magnetic healing devices which appear daily on television and also said that she was not aware that magazines like Nexus, Informed Choice and others carried advertisements and promotions for untested and unregistered products. In any case, these would be of no concern to her organisation. Until now there has been no body or organisation with the specific objective of countering quackery. Groups like the Australian Skeptics have done a lot, but they have other agendas and other interests which compete for time and resources. The Australian Council Against Health Fraud has been set up to focus exclusively on the protection of consumers against the sorts of "alternative" medical products and practices which endanger lives, impoverish people, and distract people from seeking real medical advice. ACAHF is not opposed to alternative medicine as such, only to that part of it which is scientifically unsupportable and unproven. Anything which is safe and which can be shown to work is not a problem or a concern for ACAHF. Unfortunately, too much of it is either unproven or cannot ever be proven to work, and much of it is actually dangerous.

The ACAHF was registered as a non-profit association on October 20 and will gradually come to life over the next few weeks, with the official launch planned for January 2004. More details can be found at the prototype ACAHF web site at www.acahf.org.au (the site will evolve and expand over the next few weeks.). I encourage everyone who has an interest in defeating quackery to help ACAHF to bring some sanity to the debate about alternative medicine.

After eight years of fighting medical quackery and nonsense, I decided to retire the Australian Council Against Health Fraud in 2011. I simply didn't have the time to do it any more, and in any case most of what I put on the ACAHF web site also appeared elsewhere. When I gave talks nobody seemed to care what organisation I represented, and I usually got introduced as being from ratbags.com anyway. Having an actual incorporated organisation meant paperwork, accounting and tax duties, and I thought my time could be better spent than filling in forms and worrying about when bureaucrats required things to be submitted.