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Professor lashes out against alternative medicine industry

Respiratory Care Weekly, November 29, 2006

In a strong condemnation of the alternative medicine industry, an essay in the December British Medical Journal calls for increased scrutiny and governmental regulation similar to that of the pharmaceutical industry. The rationale comes from an estimation that up to 80% of all patients with cancer take a complementary alternative treatment or follow a dietary program to help treat their cancer, writes Jonathan Waxman, Professor of Oncology at Imperial College London. He says the alternative medicine industry disregards science and profits from false hope.

"It's time for legislation to focus on a particularly vulnerable section of our society and do something to limit the exploitation of our patients," he says. "Reclassify these agents as drugs-for this is after all how they are marketed-and protect our patients from vile and cynical exploitation whose intellectual basis, at best, might be viewed as delusional."

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