I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to learn that the Min­is­ter of Health is con­cerned about the un­sub­stan­ti­at­ed claims made by lo­cal al­ter­na­tive med­i­cine spe­cial­ists with re­gard to the ef­fi­ca­cy of their prod­ucts. This phe­nom­e­non is not nov­el to T&T. There are many lo­cal­ly mar­ket­ed al­ter­na­tive treat­ments that are preg­nant with ex­ag­ger­at­ed claims.

For ex­am­ple, Mr Trevor Say­ers claims that he has a prod­uct that can "deal with HIV." We are left to won­der the mean­ing of "deal" in this con­text. How­ev­er, since his prod­ucts are mar­ket­ed to pro­vide cures, the mean­ing may be one sim­ple as­sump­tion away.

In light of this, some ques­tions nat­u­ral­ly arise. Have these prod­ucts been val­i­dat­ed by dou­ble-blind clin­i­cal tri­als? If not, have sim­i­lar prod­ucts been val­i­dat­ed? If so, are these re­sults ac­ces­si­ble from the body of peer-re­viewed aca­d­e­m­ic lit­er­a­ture? These ques­tions may os­ten­si­bly be in poor taste giv­en the sup­port that these prod­ucts en­joy lo­cal­ly. How­ev­er, these ques­tions need to be an­swered sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly and not de­cid­ed by ju­ry in the court of pub­lic opin­ion.

It is the du­ty of the reg­u­la­to­ry ser­vices to seek val­i­da­tion of these ad­ver­tised claims. In the ab­sence of a strin­gent, ev­i­dence-based reg­u­la­to­ry regime, it is very like­ly for in­di­vid­ual ex­pec­ta­tion bias and the nat­ur­al pas­sage of ru­mour to turn gar­den sea­son­ing in­to a cash cow for an al­ter­na­tive med­i­cine spe­cial­ist. It would be un­for­tu­nate if the pub­lic is duped in­to ac­cept­ing place­bos mas­querad­ing as panacea.

It is al­so in­struc­tive to note that Mr Say­ers some­times us­es the ti­tle "doc­tor." Mr Say­ers is not in pos­ses­sion of a med­ical de­gree or oth­er doc­tor­ate from an ac­cred­it­ed in­sti­tu­tion. The use of the hon­orif­ic "doc­tor" is there­fore dis­hon­est and mis­lead­ing since a prospec­tive buy­er would as­sume the sell­er pos­sess­es a de­gree of ex­per­tise.

I am a PhD stu­dent and I do feel per­son­al­ly in­sult­ed by this abuse of ti­tle giv­en the work that comes with at­tain­ing the hon­orif­ic in an hon­est fash­ion. In the na­tion­al in­ter­est, I pro­pose that Mr Say­ers pro­vide an in­de­pen­dent for­eign body with a full cat­a­logue of his prod­ucts and their pur­port­ed claims to be clin­i­cal­ly test­ed. Fail­ing that, it may be bet­ter to err on the side of cau­tion and dis­card these items on the garbage heap of hu­man progress which is the fi­nal rest­ing place of junk sci­ence.

Randy Evin Shane

Harnar­i­nesingh