It seems that being an anti-vaxxer is a bad thing now, in the minds of the public. Nobody wants to be labeled as such. So, people who, for all intents and purposes, are anti-vax, have started calling themselves ex-vaxxers.
To a certain extent this is literally true – people who’ve previously vaccinated but now no longer do could certainly claim such a label.
But this misses the point.
Some people have claimed that they’re not anti-vax. They just want vaccines to be tested properly (they have), and shown to work effectively (they have), or to be made “safer” by removing harmful toxins (hint: the poison is in the dose).
You don’t have to utter the words “don’t use vaccines” to be anti-vax. Spreading misinformation about the safety and efficacy of vaccines is enough to deserve the title of anti-vaxxer.
To be clear, vaccines are one of the most important and effective improvements in public health we’ve ever had. In this age of a global pandemic, you’d think people might be more aware of this.
At the risk of it appearing as if there’s only one person who concerns NZ Skeptics, we’ve yet another item of concern from that erstwhile bank manager, turned psychic medium and now health guru. Yes, Jeanette Wilson is at it again.
Wilson seems to be really turning up the heat on her online workshops. Back in May of this year some of our skeptical operatives attended an online session run in a Zoom meeting where Wilson made some astounding health claims, including ones about COVID-19. The story was picked up by Toby Manhire of The Spinoff and showcased a bunch of the outlandish claims being made.
On the heels of that online workshop we became aware of another one. This time, promoting an electronic device by the name of Healy. This does now seem to be her new focus.
I attended the video conference – this time a Facebook Live video session to take a look at what was being promoted.
The session was attended by around 30 people, though there were people coming and going all the time. Wilson’s new approach seems to be to set up a new private Facebook group which you must then apply to join. I applied in my own name and was allowed in. (This surprised me as Wilson definitely has mentioned me by name before so would have been aware of me, although, she does seem to have some assistants so perhaps it wasn’t Wilson personally that allowed me to join.)
Unlike a Zoom conference call, there is only limited opportunity for interaction with the hosts – just by comments in the feed. Most of the participants’ comments were supportive of the device, with some having already purchased it.
I inserted some skeptical comments which lasted for some time, but alas (and perhaps predictably) I was blocked, and no longer able to comment. I’ve since been denied access to the group.
The session was run in Wilson’s video studio that we saw in the previous Zoom session. It’s a conference table with TV monitors behind it. This session was hosted by Wilson and 3 other people. The setup is relatively sophisticated – each person has their own inconspicuous mic attached to their head, and there are multiple cameras and sound mixing, so somebody technical is operating things behind the cameras. (It turns out, through some further reveals from Wilson, that it’s her partner and business partner Andrew Carter.)
The hosts of the video were Wilson plus a guy from South Africa, who claims to be a healer and Reiki Master. There was also a husband and wife team who were, it seemed, intent on pushing the business side of things.
The Healy device
The device, according to Wilson, is a wearable bio-resonance device that measures your body’s frequency and then sends you the frequencies you need for cell health, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being.
The Healy device is developed and marked by a company based in Germany. The basis of the product is a small electronic device that is worn on the person, and some electrodes which connect to it, allowing it to put electric current through the body. The electrodes are typically connected to each ear. It is claimed to be an “energy device”, with 144,000 frequencies programmed into it. The device connects to a smart phone app using Bluetooth. The app then gives the user the ability to monitor various aspects of their wellbeing, and then select the appropriate “frequency programme” that will cure what ails them.
There are various versions of the device with different features and prices. I’m skeptical, though, that the device actually has different versions – it’s likely that it’s the same device with various options enabled in the app depending on how much you pay.
This is an expensive device – the presentation showed the entry-level device and accompanying app – at 416 Euros, which converts to about 720 NZD. I’ve found that the device can be ordered online, and the prices are quoted in Singapore dollars (which are currently about $1.10 NZD). The various versions are:
Version
Cost – SGD
NZD
Healy Gold
$715
$779
Healy Holistic Health
$1,435
$1,564
Healy Holistic Health Plus
$2,150
$2,343
Healy Resonance
$3,585
$3,907
Those prices are for the device alone. It is recommended that you also subscribe to the app, at a cost of $50 NZD/month. There is also a nutrition option (called the DNA – digital nutrition analysis) at $160 NZD a month. I’d say these are staggering prices, but can you put a price on your health and wellbeing?
Many claims were made for the device, but any talk of curing brought out the standard “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” line of “we can’t legally say it cures anything”, but the impression that one would take away from their presentation was that it was great for a whole bunch of ailments.
They also made the claim that it was FDA approved (as in the Food and Drug Administration in the USA), also claiming that you don’t get FDA approval without a device working. This is patently false (no pun intended). In reality, the device has FDA clearance, which is completely different from approval. All that is required for FDA clearance is to show that the device is similar to another device that has been previously approved or cleared by the FDA. This does not mean that the device actually works. They can piggy-back off a more legitimate product.
There’s also a watch form of the device, which they claim is much better than an Apple Watch. It’s claimed that it can give you an ECG graph that you could take along to your doctor for diagnosis that “contains only 4% less data than a doctor’s ECG would have”. Quite astounding really!
The nutrition aspect of the device was sold as giving advice on what you should be eating for optimum health. Claims of weight loss were part of the features that the device offered.
Rounding out the benefits, there’s also a Traditional Chinese Medicine Zodiac body organ calendar. This was quite fascinating. Apparently there are only twelve organs in the body and, depending on the time of day, you’re meant to concentrate on that particular organ. So, maybe between 11pm and 1pm you should be concentrating on helping out your kidneys. Another time during the day was for the lungs, etc.
Typical scientific-sounding claims were made about how the device interacted with the body. It’s claimed that the electrodes normalise the voltages in the your body’s cells. They claim that young, healthy cells have a potential of negative 70mV across them, and as they age that decreases down to zero. By using the device these voltages can be restored to health levels.
“In the course of his studies of physics and philosophy in Heidelberg and Hanover, he developed the vision of exploring the interaction between matter and consciousness…
Among other things, he has also studied Vedic philosophy and architecture during his stays in various Indian monasteries.”
There are typical claims of quantum “woo”:
“…the basis of matter is not only energy but information.”
“Every body, every person has an “Information field” and each quantum system has a specific resonance frequency and if you find the right frequencies, you can change the energetic and material state.”
Also involved in the development is an alternative medicine practitioner from Portugal by the name of Nuno Nina. He has a clinic that provides alternative therapies in the form of electrical current, and it is his “research” that has developed the 144,000 “gold” frequency programmes that are built into the Healy device.
The Healy device is a commoditisation of a former product – the TimeWaver. The TimeWaver operated on similar principles but was designed as a system for use by specialised alternative medical practitioners.
The business aspects of Healy
From what I could assess in the video conference there are several business aspects to this.
Firstly, the device being targeted at scientifically and medically illiterate people that have the money to plonk down on a product that makes grand claims for improved health and well-being. Claims for being able to provide relief for chronic pain are being made and it seems likely that there are people desperate enough to purchase the device on the basis of hyped up claims. Placebo effects and expectation will likely play a part in the success of the device.
Healy is also set up as a Multi-level Marketing company. The idea is that you purchase the device and then sell the concept and business to your friends and associates, who then sell the device and concept to their friends and associates. Along the way, you earn commission from your downline sales.
Thirdly, Wilson is promoting the device to alternative medical practitioners would buy the device then use it to diagnose and heal clients remotely – basically a gimmick to sell their time to gullible rubes.
From the perspective of an MLM there are review websites. Even these sites have negative recommendations of the Healy MLM business, citing the price of the device being a barrier to sales. But some entrepreneurs are thinking that this business will be the next big thing. I even found a printing company that has dedicated themselves (or at least a website) to providing merchandise for Healy dealers. Healyprints.com has a range of Healy-related products including business cards, t-shirts, padded sports bras, and flip-flops!
The Healy company predictably has disclaimers on their website:
“While scientific research underlies Healy technology, its connection to health and wellness has not been extensively explored or demonstrated. The Healy is not intended to cure, treat, mitigate, diagnose or prevent disease, but rather to support energetic balance and enhance recovery, vitality and wellbeing.”
Of concern with any MLM company are the representatives that go out and often make claims about the products that go well beyond the features of the product. Unfortunately, with so many distributors, it’s all but impossible to counter these claims. Of course, the Healy company has a disclaimer to cover this too:
“Healy World, with the advice of its advisory board, allows its affiliates to only make claims that are contained in company materials meant for public distribution. Please contact the company concerning any claims about which you have questions.”
Demonstration video
Wilson released a video that demonstrates how to use the device, and the app that accompanies it. It is particularly laughable.
Wilson tries to present an explanation of how the device works. She shows a diagram she clearly has no understanding of. Confusing microvolts with millivolts, then amperes with milliamperes. She clearly has no understanding of this, but then her likely audience doesn’t either and will be impressed by the science-y sounding words and explanations.
In the app you can enter the details of the client you are working with – such as their name, photo and date of birth. This is uploaded into the Healy Cloud. Incidentally, in the online workshop a big deal was made of the fact that Healy had their own “cloud” and that it wasn’t Google or Microsoft or Amazon. So, client details are likely held on a less secure server than big commercial offerings would provide for!
In the video she demonstrates the app on her partner – waving her right index finger over the screen so that the app can then somehow sense his needs and deficiencies. It is unclear how the Healy device is involved in this. Is the device somehow remotely sensing the client? Her partner was in the same room, operating the cameras and other technical equipment, but the implication is that this can be done remotely over the internet – the client themselves not having to possess a Healy device.
Once the diagnosis is complete, the app can then remotely send the frequencies to the client – it’s not clear how this actually happens, but the app shows some pretty, moving graphs which supposedly show the transmission taking place. Each “diagnosis” in the app also comes with some text that the user is meant to read out which somehow makes the therapy effective:
“With the power of my divine consciousness I now transfer all selected qualities and information into the field of the client. May they work for the highest well-being of the whole until an optimal balance for the client has been achieved (thank you!)”
So, with some special incantations this all works, magically!
As a software developer myself I’m astounded at what must have been going through the minds of the developer or developers who wrote the app. They really must have been aware of the scammy, pseudo-scientific nature of this. There really is no plausible mechanism that this can possibly work. From what I can see in the app, it will be making use of random number generators rather than actually communicating with the Healy device and reading the “quantum sensor”.
From a business perspective the device seems to be being used as a “dongle” – a device that must be present to allow the app to work. At least in the mode of remote treatment, it has no possible mechanism by which it could work.
There’s little money to be made these days in sales of apps unless you have millions of downloads, but charging for a physical device that makes an app work is probably a good way to make money.
Conclusions
In this new world we live in in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic it appears that alternative medical practitioners are moving to remote working from home that the Healy device will give them new opportunities to exploit this.
What is being promoted though is an expensive product, both in its initial outlay, and ongoing costs, that has little plausibility. Its marketing appears to be a cynical attempt to prey on the ignorance and fears of consumers. My assessment of Wilson is that she’s a bit of a dimbulb and gullible participant in this, but quite happy to take her followers along for the ride.
Local “psychic medium” Jeanette Wilson seems to be finding surviving the COVID-19 pandemic a little challenging. No longer can she tour the country running her Psychic Surgery sessions, and with the NZ border closed, she can’t travel to the UK. And they say pandemics don’t have a silver lining!
But, in this age of internet technology, she’s now running online “training” sessions for wannabe psychic mediums. In reality, these sessions seem to be little more than opportunities for Jeanette to waffle on about the latest conspiracy theory that has percolated into her brain.
How do we know this? Well well-known psychic debunker Susan Gerbic, and a team of our local NZ Skeptics members recently paid to attend one of Wilson’s sessions. Painful as it was, they sat through two hours of the “training”.
They passed the video of the event onto Toby Manhire, journalist at The Spinoff, who wrote a fantastic article about the event, going into detail about the fantastic claims that Wilson was making, including some extremely dubious health claims about a product that supposedly protected against COVID-19.
Wilson is claiming she didn’t say what she clearly said, and Toby has seen the full video. Wilson claims the product “lines the lungs” preventing the SARS-CoV-2 virus from attaching to the lungs.
Amusingly, Wilson hasn’t even realised that some of the people attending her session were skeptics. She mistakenly assumed, via a message out to her group, that one of the attendees shared the video with us. You’d think that if she truly was a psychic medium, in touch with the spirit world, that one of her spirit friends would have clued her in that there were skeptics in on the call.
Last week we ran a campaign to get self-proclaimed “spiritual
medium” and “healer” Jeanette Wilson shut down. This woman is touring NZ, doing
a show called Psychic Surgery, which purports to be able to heal people (not
cure, mind!) of whatever ails them. The “mechanism” is that she communicates
with a team of “spirit surgeons” who when work the magic (being the operative word!)
on her rubes patients. But it’s all God doing the work – she’s just the
medium.
We got some good publicity in the media (https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/400150/sceptics-aim-to-shut-down-nz-tour-by-spiritual-healer),
after emailing all of the venues in a bid to get the hires rescinded, and the
tour effectively shut down. Alas, it seems that the profit motive is stronger
than the ethics motive. Of the venues that did bother to reply, the common
response was that they could not be responsible for what goes on at their
venues.
Of note is that Radio New Zealand actually interviewed Ms.
Wilson. This is really worth a listen. Seldom do we get to hear woo merchants “put
it all out there” and make the claims in public as to what they think they can
do. https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018715951
Our activity does seem to have riled Wilson up. She’s made
the claim that skeptics don’t attend her shows – if they did they’d see
first-hand what an amazing healer she is, and, ridiculously, why aren’t the
medical community studying her? Well, we have attended her shows. What we have
seen is that the “healing” as such is likely to be placebo effects, and long-term
relief is unlikely. What is surprising is that her spirit surgeons didn’t let
her know that there were skeptics in the audience. So much for being able to communicate
with “the other side”.
It’s also caused her to come visit our website – she probably
has a Google Alert set up on her name (Hi, Jeanette!). This led to a tirade on
her Facebook page where she ridiculously claimed that NZ Skeptics were driven
(maybe even funded?) by “Big Pharma”. She was shocked that a NZ Charity would
be promoting vaccines (which, you won’t need to be reminded, are safe and
effective). Apparently, she will be complaining to NZ Charities – bring it on,
we say!
We make light of her ridiculous shows, but there is a
serious side, which is why we took action. People that attend these shows tend
to be vulnerable. Our skeptics who attended the shows witnessed some people who
appeared to be quite unstable, being subject to the attention of this woman.
As we’ve seen with other woo merchants, their woo doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Once you go down one anti-science rabbit hole, there are plenty of other warrens to keep you there. Wilson’s Facebook page is a scary (but amusing) place. She’s anti-vax (despite claiming she’s not), she’s a climate-change denier, and she’s also anti-5G. She also claims that you can cure your eyesight by throwing away your glasses and using pinhole glasses. She also sells a dietary supplement, Purple Rice Powder, which, we’re told, is earning her $20,000 a month. It just goes to show that there’s big money to be made in pseudoscience.
To conclude, we never really expected to be able to shut
down her shows, though it would have been great to be able to do so. The hope
for the future is education – a population that is science-literate is unlikely
to fall for the ploys of charlatans pushing false hope.
NZ-based, self-described “spiritual medium” Jeanette Wilson has started touring the country with her Psychic Surgery show. We’re running a campaign to try to disrupt this by contacting the venues and making them aware of the sort of thing they’re hosting.
“Traditional” psychic surgery has involved literal blood and guts from animals being passed off as tumours and other tissues being removed from patients’ bodies. Jeanette Wilson bypasses all this messy stuff and simply walks around the patient flailing her arms and making weird “Eeeeeeeee!” sounds. All this under the guidance of her supposed team of “spiritual surgeons” on the other side.
This really is unbelievable. If you want to witness her performance, she has videos on her website.
Earlier this year we sent one of our committee members along to her show in Christchurch to observe the event and report back. What he saw was quite shocking. These shows seem to attract vulnerable people and one person there looked to be on the verge of a breakdown. So, this really is serious stuff.
Forty dollars is what it costs you to attend, but that’s just the start. She’s also running a sideline business promoting Purple Rice Powder as a dietary supplement, costing upwards of $100 for a month’s supply.
So, this person is a danger to the community. Any healing is likely just taking advantage of placebo effects, but the concern is that people with more serious conditions might well delay or avoid proper medical treatment by attending one of her shows.
Her shows aren’t limited to NZ either. She travels to the UK doing the same stuff over there. So, earlier this year, we contacted the Good Thinking Society in the UK to make them aware. They ran a campaign of contacting her venues and had good success in getting them to cancel the bookings after being made aware of what she was doing. We are hopeful that we can achieve the same here.
Locally, if you’re close to one of her venues, perhaps a well-placed word to them might sway them towards reconsidering their hiring decisions.
Tickets to the NZ Skeptics Conference 2019 are now available for sale, with early-bird prices until the end of September (but of course, we’d love you to buy sooner so we get a good idea of numbers).
The conference has a bunch of exciting speakers, including all the hosts of the popular Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast, Guerrilla Skeptic and psychic buster Susan Gerbic, and world-renowned mentalist and psychic entertainer Mark Edward.
This year’s conference will be held in the heart of Christchurch. Visit the conference website for more information and to get your tickets.
The Force Field Film Challenge, aimed at helping kids to learn about the importance of vaccines, is an innovative competition being spearheaded by the New Zealand Skeptics.
The Challenge will test the research and creative skills of New Zealand Primary and Intermediate students in a deep dive to promote vaccination and the advantages of herd immunity. Students will be asked to put together a short film, up to three minutes long, to educate New Zealanders on how vaccination and its strong but seemingly invisible protective force field works.
Full-on creativity will be a requirement! Costumes, puppets, animation and any other presentation techniques that can grab the viewer’s attention are encouraged. A comedy sketch that shows how evil diseases can get thwarted? A gritty drama demonstrating how powerful vaccinations are at keeping New Zealanders healthier? Anything goes! The Number 8 wire, out of the box thinking that New Zealand prides itself on will be put to the test.
In preparation for this challenge, the NZ Skeptics have launched a funding campaign with Givealittle to help raise the prize money:
The funding goal of $10,000 will be exclusively used as prize money, and will be awarded to the winning schools. The first place entry will win $5,000, with five runner-up entries getting $1,000 each.
NZ Skeptics Chair, Craig Shearer, said “It’s a sad fact that, even today, preventable diseases can have a horrific impact on New Zealand communities. The overwhelming scientific consensus shows that widespread vaccinations, resulting in herd immunity, are a safe and effective tool to fight these diseases. Measles, Influenza, Whooping Cough and even Polio have all been shown to be effectively combated by modern vaccinations.”
The Givealittle funding campaign will run until the 30th of April, with The Force Field Film Challenge being launched later in 2019. The challenge will be managed by the New Zealand Skeptics, a New Zealand registered charity.
Facebook has been host to some lively discussion among Kiwis who identify as having a skeptical outlook. These pages are not endorsed by NZ Skeptics Society, and we have no control over their content. Unfortunately, some of the content falls well outside the collective views of the NZ Skeptics committee.
We have now set up an official page on Facebook which will reflect the general views of NZ Skeptics. We’ll be sharing curated content here and making general announcements that are relevant to members of the society and a broader NZ audience.
We’ve recently seen another example of psychics acting as the “grief vampires” they are and preying on a grieving family.
Northland woman Theres’a Urlich has been missing since February 2018. The family, who have not seen their loved on for over seven months, was recently approached by a psychic with some gory details of what had happened to Theres’a.
The family decided to contact the police. The response from NZ Police is:
Police do not currently work with psychics and it is entirely the decision of the family if they wish to pursue that avenue.
This is a good thing!
NZ Skeptics were approach the the NZ Herald for our response. NZ Skeptics chair Craig Shearer was quoted at length. Read the NZ Herald article for more details.
The NZ Skeptics are a voice of reason in New Zealand, and aim to promote the scientific method and evidence-based decision making throughout the public sphere. Healthcare decisions are an important part of this ideal, and we strongly support any measures that seek to follow best evidence and help protect consumers from harm. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to have a say in this consultation.
In a similar manner to the “Pharmacy Council Complementary and Alternative Medicines – Statement and Protocol for Pharmacists”, we will refer to these products as “CAM” and “CAM products” within our submission. However we are hesitant to use this acronym because of its inclusion of the word Medicine, where these products have not proven themselves to be medicines.
1. Can you think of any ethical values for the pharmacy profession that appear to be omitted from the revised code?
Yes.
We believe that the current 2011 Pharmacy Council Code of Ethics, which states (in clause 6.9) that pharmacists must “Only purchase, supply or promote any medicine, complementary therapy, herbal remedy or other healthcare product where there is no reason to doubt its quality or safety and when there is credible evidence of efficacy” is, in principle at least, a good guideline for pharmacists.
Many pharmacies currently supply and promote CAM healthcare products for which there is a very obvious lack of credible evidence of efficacy – even with this code of ethics in place. We are concerned that the general trend in New Zealand has been for pharmacies to sell more CAM over time, presumably driven by a situation where many pharmacies struggle to make enough money to remain viable businesses when selling prescription and over-the-counter medicines alone. An example of this trend is that there is an annual Pharmacy Award for the Best Complementary Healthcare Campaign.
Pharmacists, and pharmacies, enjoy a high level of trust from the public due to their knowledge and expertise, and the importance of the task of dispensing prescription medicines and advising patients that has been entrusted to them. Unfortunately, in order to improve their viability as businesses, many pharmacies appear to have decided to trade on that trust and sell CAM products that purport to improve people’s health, but which do not have good quality evidence backing their use.
The vast majority of these CAM products are unlikely to ever be shown to be efficacious (due the lack of any plausible mechanism of action), and in the short term they are harmless at best – if we ignore their direct financial cost to patients. In the long term, however, these ineffective products are likely to damage patients’ health literacy, making them less knowledgeable about what constitutes good healthcare. They will also tend to make patients less likely to seek proper medical care for their health conditions, instead relying on these unproven products for their future health needs.
If pharmacies find that they need to supplement their income by selling products other than prescription and over-the-counter medicines, there are many products that they could sell that are not health related. We think that it would be much better for pharmacists to avoid the risk of ethically unsound practices, and we would expect the Pharmacy Council’s new Code of Ethics to be an aid in ensuring that pharmacies behave ethically in this regard and do not sell any products that have not been proven to work.
Unfortunately the new code of ethics appears to weaken the stance taken by the 2011 code, rather than strengthening it; only requiring that a pharmacist satisfies themselves that a product is appropriate for the patient (clause 1g).
In essence the proposed new code seems to be worded in a way that, in a perfect world, patients would be protected from the sale of ineffective health products. All pharmacists, and pharmacy staff, would have a good level of knowledge of the evidence base for all CAM products they sold, and they would be free of all biases.
However, in reality, there are a wide range of beliefs about CAM amongst pharmacists and pharmacy staff – and not all of these beliefs accord with the best evidence for these products.
The “secret shopper” exercise undertaken by members of the NZ Skeptics two years ago showed that pharmacies, and pharmacists, are more likely to promote an ineffective product (homeopathic products, in the case of our exercise) than to warn of its ineffectiveness. If the behaviour that we saw in 2015 is indicative of the general stance that pharmacies hold with regard to CAM, and we think that this is a fair conclusion, we believe that pharmacists are often not acting in the best interests of the patient when it comes to CAM. They may not be in possession of the best available evidence, and there is also a real risk that a pharmacy’s need to make money can cloud proper judgement when it comes to selling these products.
For these reasons, we consider that leaving individual pharmacists to be the judges of what constitutes a good level of evidence for a CAM product is not prudent. We believe that it is the Pharmacy Council’s responsibility to help pharmacies navigate the myriad of CAM products that are currently on the market, and ensure that they are not selling ineffective products to patients. We think that the Pharmacy Council should not be scared to provide a robust level of guidance for pharmacists when it comes to both unproven and ineffective CAM products.
We believe that this guidance can be effected in part by creating a list of classes of CAM products that have been shown to be ineffective (such as homeopathy), and which should not be sold in pharmacies. The Pharmacy Council should also target the most popular CAM products being sold in pharmacies, and create information resources for both pharmacists and patients explaining the current evidence, or lack of evidence, for these products. These resources could include booklets that are made available in pharmacies, and given out when these products are purchased, and web pages that are placed online, either on the Pharmacy Council’s website or a site specifically for providing information about CAM products.
2. Considering the explanation of the term “patient” and equivalent terms in the key terms (key terms):
a. Do you think the term “patient” is the best word to use, most of the time, to express the relationship that exits between the pharmacist and the person they are directly or indirectly caring for or providing health care information to?
Yes.
We think that the word “patient” is a positive step towards impressing on pharmacists the importance of the relationship they have with the public, and the trust that the public place in pharmacists to behave in a way that is in individual patients’ best interests.
b. Are there any specific clauses where you can think of different term that could be more appropriate?
No
3. Considering the new clauses that relate to the sale of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM, clauses 1g, 4h and 4hh): Do you find it clear that the Council is not opposed to the sale of CAM when they have demonstrated benefits for patients, have minimal risks, and the patient is making an informed choice?
No.
We think that the clauses do not make it clear that they are not opposed to the sale of CAM “when they have demonstrated benefits for patients, have minimal risks, and the patient is making an informed choice”. What the clauses appear to do, instead, is to allow the sale of CAM when an individual pharmacist believes that these products “have demonstrated benefits for patients, have minimal risks, and the patient is making an informed choice”.
This is a subtle, but important, difference. We think that the proposed code would allow for a pharmacist to sell homeopathic products, for example, simply by holding a sincere belief that these products “have demonstrated benefits for patients, have minimal risks, and the patient is making an informed choice”. This belief would not accord with reality, but merely holding it appears to be sufficient to circumvent this code.
To paraphrase the songwriter Tim Minchin, “what do you call Complementary and Alternative Medicines (CAM) that have demonstrated benefits for patients? Medicine”
4. Are there any other comments you would like the Council to consider?
Yes.
We would like to see the Pharmacy Council produce a set of clear rules for when a product can be deemed to be ineffective; a clear, transparent process outlined for dealing with complaints against pharmacies selling products that are not evidence based; and clear penalties for pharmacies that are found to be in breach of these guidelines. The new code does not appear to allow for this to happen, and instead we suspect that it is unlikely that the Pharmacy Council will end up using this new code to censure a pharmacy for selling ineffective health products.
We would be interested to find out, given the many apparent breaches of the current code of ethics where pharmacies are selling CAM without credible evidence of efficacy, how often pharmacies have been found by the Pharmacy Council to be in breach of the code, and what action was taken in each case.
We would also like to see the Pharmacy Council introduce a way to effectively measure whether pharmacies are following the code of ethics – some method of proactively auditing the compliance of pharmacies. These checks would have to be incognito, to ensure that an accurate measure is taken of how pharmacies are promoting CAM to patients.
The NZ Skeptics believe that the available scientific evidence shows community water fluoridation to be both a safe and effective measure for reducing incidence of tooth decay. What we see in the behaviour and tactics of the anti-fluoridation movement in New Zealand echoes similar behaviour we see from other ideologically anti-science groups, such as the anti-vaccination movement. This includes “cherry picking” of only the evidence that supports their position while ignoring any data to the contrary, misrepresenting scientific studies, and flouting New Zealand regulations in order to misinform the public.
We believe that the anti fluoridation movement has come out against this bill not because they believe that local councils are better able to make healthcare decisions for the public, but because it is easier for them to influence and subvert these decisions when they are made at a local council level – as we have seen them do in the past.
The Proposal
The NZ Skeptics support the proposed change of moving the decision to fluoridate water supplies away from local councils, and transferring it to District Health Boards
As water fluoridation is a public health measure, we believe that DHBs will be better suited to make an informed decision than local councils are. DHBs have staff on hand who are proficient in reading and analysing scientific studies, and they also monitor the health of their district’s residents. These two skills will allow DHB staff to advise the Board members of each DHB as to whether fluoridation is an appropriate measure.
Other agencies
We would like to note that if a change is made to move the decision making process to central government rather than to DHBs, we would be supportive of this move.
Thank you for the opportunity to be able to give our opinion on the proposed change to this important health measure.
