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The Right to Good Medicine What the CPSO doesn’t tend to like shares certain characteristics: treatments that are low-tech, natural, don’t require drugs, use drugs in novel ways - and diagnoses that implicate as causes the deadly side-effects of drugs and our pesticide-loaded food, polluted air and water in chronic illness. The internationally accepted warnings against smoking and high-fat diets, valid as they are, nevertheless belong into the “blame-the-patient” category that, ultimately, does not impact on the sickness industry. However, since it is environmental pollution, not sinful behavior, that causes most cancer and chronic disease, the blame lies squarely with those industries that create the cancer-causing agents – primarily the drug and pesticide manufacturers. Instead of actively encouraging doctors who work to rid our bodies of disease-causing toxins and who teach us how to make our environments safe, this country’s largest medical regulatory agency uses its formidable powers and resources to discredit medicine that addresses the most important health issues of our time and to harass physicians who want to help us. One of the instruments of control the CPSO uses to ensure everything stays the same (high-tech, toxic, symptom-control-oriented, and lucrative) is the “Complementary Medicine Policy”. It is up for internal review this year. This is an opportunity for action. The CPSO is used to exercising control over medical standards unchallenged by virtue of their authority as a self-governing body protected by 19th century administrative law. In 1997 the wide-spread public protest over the then ongoing disciplinary case against environmental medicine expert Dr. Jozef Krop forced them into a public relations effort. The infamous Complementary Medicine (CAM) Policy was hatched. It was supposed to make the CPSO look tolerant and progressive, but in fact it is a hold-all for everything the CPSO has a history of trying to discredit. That CAM policy makes it possible to keep the drugs-as-usual scene in place and curb the availability of some of the greatest medical discoveries of the last 50 years: in nutrition, detoxification methods for environmental toxins, mind-body therapies, new approaches to cancer and degenerative disease, recognition of new diseases (like Multiple Chemical Sensitivity), effective novel treatments of old diseases like chronic pain - all summarized as “magic” or lacking in “evidence” (as defined by themselves). One lawyer specializing in legal medicine refers to this policy as “pernicious”, described in the dictionary as “having a harmful effect, especially in a gradual or subtle way.” The only ones on whom this policy does not have a pernicious effect are the drug companies and the insurance companies to which so many of the CPSO council members are connected. “What about the Kwinter Bill?” those of you will ask who fought long and hard to help make it law. It was passed with unanimous legislative consent in 2000 even though the CPSO fought it literally to the last day. Now a guiding principle of the Medicine Act, it states that a doctor “shall not be found guilty of professional misconduct or of incompetence under section 51 or 52 of the Health Professions Procedural Code solely on the basis that [he/she] practices a therapy that is non-traditional or that departs from the prevailing medical practice, unless there is evidence that proves that the therapy poses greater risk to a patient’s health than the traditional or prevailing practice.” MPP (Lib.) Monte Kwinter famously observed in one of his addresses to the legislature that “at the CPSO the attitude tends to be, that if it ain’t invented here it ain’t invented.” What we have today is legislation that protects medical innovation and the consensual doctor-patient relationship, which the medical regulatory agency chooses to ignore by maintaining a policy that stands in contradiction to the law. What’s more, in interviews with Charter and criminal lawyers, I was told that the CPSO’s CAM policy could be challenged in court as being contrary to natural justice and in contravention of at least one section of the Charter. Interestingly, the view that the CPSO is out of touch with reality is supported by an Ontario government-sponsored report produced by KPMG in July 2000. Over 52 pages it details how this medical regulatory body has no idea what responsibility it has to the public. Yet, the very legislative mandate on which the CPSO’s powers are founded, the Regulated Health Professions Act (RHPA), states that it is their “duty to serve and protect the public interest” (Schedule II, Section 3/2). Kwinter put it well when he observed, after his famous bill became law, “It will take a lot more than my bill to bring the CPSO under control.” In 2000, several medical associations and patient groups got together and in 2001 produced the Glasnost Report which meticulously documents the CPSO’s abuses of the law and, thereby, of patients and innovative doctors. The CAM policy figures prominently in that abuse of power. (Available on www.collegeofphysicianswatchdog.com ). That same group is now supporting the demand made on February 21 by the doctors of the Ontario Medical Association’s Section on Complementary Medicine that “this CAM policy be brought in line with current thinking” and the law. The CAM policy was introduced by the CPSO in 1997 while the trial of Dr. Krop was in progress. The PR exercise included public hearings for two days and many presentations, most by CAM physicians. The CPSO’s committee responsible for the final product was perfectly stacked: not one practising complementary physician on it. Not surprisingly, the final version does not reflect what the CAM medical community had actually presented or what the public had asked for. And in the case of Dr. J. Krop, this very policy has already been used as an instrument of control: he was ordered to adjust his practice to this policy or risk losing his license altogether. In 2000 the policy came up for internal review, and discussion was quickly swept under the carpet, so it remained in force. Now it is up for internal review again. The complementary doctors, supported by other medical groups, have written a letter to every council member identifying this policy’s legal and medical iniquities. The CAM Policy
A short and harmless-looking version of the CAM policy is available on the CPSO’s web site www.cpso.on.ca . It does not include the devilish details, the worst being a phrase that allows the CPSO to bypass legal obligations to fundamental fairness and retain arbitrary control the process. The policy states: “a fair review [of a CAM practitioner] can be achieved independent of the particular expertise of the assessor. In other words, if the CPSO chooses to look into the practice of a CAM physician, they can send in anybody they please who doesn’t have a ghost of a notion about CAM. I have sat through the trials of several such physicians. In the trials of environmental medicine physician Dr. Krop and asthma and allergy expert Dr. Kooner, the College-appointed assessors admitted in cross-examination that they knew nothing about either physician’s type of work. The College’s expert witnesses in the Krop trial all admitted the same. Worse, these “experts” asserted that they wouldn’t be caught dead even going to a CAM medical conference and swore they had never read any of their journals. This is taking prejudice to a the level of a fine art – sponsored and endorsed by the CPSO. The apparently tolerant and encouraging language of the policy notwithstanding, the full text of the policy is permeated with the notion that complementary medicine is, by definition, “unproven”, “not generally validated”, “magical” , “of less proven value”, etc. Adding insult to injury, the policy implies that CAM physicians do not want complementary medicine “to be exposed to scientific scrutiny before being provided to the patient”. The policy then santimoniously refuses patients to be exposed to such risks. However, CAM physicians want no such thing. That implication is pure fantasy. Instead, historically, the evidence available from many discipline decisions proves that the CPSO is determined to discregard and discret whatever it decides is CAM. For example, Dr. Krop, Dr. Kooner and many other physicians produced hundreds of then current studies from mainstream medical research publications - only to have all simply ignored - without explanation. Indeed, world-class defence witnesses were simply not even mentioned has having appeard in the final trial decisions! (See physician case histories in the Glasnost Report.) As for the patients, the policy assumes that a CAM doctor is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Much paternalistic fuss is made in the CAM policy about informed consent. To ensure the patient is protected against these assumed quacks, the doctor is expected to inform the patient of all conventional therapies first, and must even “arrive at a conventional diagnosis” first – never mind you have already seen a dozen doctors who didn’t know how to fit your symptoms into the traditional boxes available, and never mind you are not willing to continue with cortisone, antidepressants or take chemotherapy. What You Can Do What You Can Do!!! - DEAD-LINE APRIL 30, 2003 Points to stress in your letter/e-mail with your own additions and observations:
Then fax or e-mail that one letter to
All numbers and e-mail addresses given at the end of my article. |
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