Homeopathy: Does Statutory Regulation of Healthcare Protect the Public?

By Julia Spivack BSc (Hons), DO, MSCC, MICO, RSHom, MSc (Ayur)

During the past few years, I have conducted formal academic research into statutory healthcare regulation, the outcome of which is that statutory healthcare regulatory bodies, far from protecting the public, are sometimes damaging them, not to mention the carnage showered upon practitioners.

I have done two research projects; one in 2006 entitled “What are the implications for the homeopathic profession of the statutory regulation of homeopathy in the United Kingdom?”  The second project was conducted in 2009 entitled “Do statutory healthcare regulatory bodies have an agenda other than their statutory duty to protect the public?”  In the 2006 project over 40 practitioners were interviewed.  In the 2009 project over 30 people were interviewed in total between May and October.

Both projects were qualitative research.  The methodology was open unstructured interviews.  In the 2009 project I interviewed doctors, osteopaths, chiropractors talking about their experiences with their respective statutory regulatory bodies.  Each interview was typed verbatim and analysed for emerging “themes”.  I also interviewed a number of other professionals connected with the regulation of the healthcare professions in a more detached capacity, such as for example a clinical governance professional.  There was a strong degree of corroboration between participants based on commonality of emerging themes.

Having qualified as an osteopath before the advent of statutory regulation of osteopathy, I can comment on how statutory regulation affects one’s day to day practice.  None of the practitioners interviewed were against statutory regulation in principle but they all said to a greater or lesser degree, that it is not working as it should be and the majority of the practitioners interviewed stated that it does not protect patients which is the primary aim

• An osteopath was requested by a female patient to provide osteopathic assistance at her childbirth with the presence of her husband also.  This osteopath suggested to the midwife he could help the baby to turn itself when contractions had ceased.  Mother and baby were distressed as the baby was in the incorrect presentation for birth and the mother with her unborn child were to be transported by ambulance to another hospital 30 minutes away, with mother in pain and strapped to a hospital trolley.  The osteopath only suggested he could help – he did nothing.  This osteopath told me the General Osteopathic Council found 24 separate material charges of offences against the osteopath and the stress of it all spilled heavily into the lives of his patient and her entire family (who were supportive and protective of their osteopath) such that it prevented the patient bonding with her newborn and caused so much stress that her husband died a few months after the case.  This husband even went to the trouble and expense of travelling to London from the north of England to meet the Head of Legal Affairs at the GOsC to ask him to account for his behaviour.  The response he received was that he was not obliged to respond and no satisfactory explanation was given.  Notes were taken of the entire conversation.  The patient and her husband made a formal complaint against the midwife to the Nursing and Midwifery Council which regulates midwives; the complaint was investigated and then dismissed.  An email to me from the osteopath states that the behaviour of the GOsC was a major contributing factor in the husband’s death.  Due to the stress put upon him by the GosC, the osteopath concerned also lost his marriage.  Two families have been destroyed and torn apart.  The patient concerned had to move away from the area to try to salvage her life.  The full interview transcript gives the precise details of how these people were traumatised.

• An osteopath was struck off for 3 months and not allowed to see patients at all for allegedly treating a neonate in a Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU) (on her day off!) without consent from the parent when it was proven that consent had been given and documented by medical staff.  You cannot even get into a SCBU without being chaperoned by nursing staff who sign you in and lock you in the unit and then sign you out again and must obtain consent from the parent or legal guardian.

• The GOsC turned a blind eye and refused to prosecute a bogus osteopath brought to their attention by several individuals.  This bogus osteopath had been reported to the police after he was found posting photographs of himself on Facebook posing with human organs which he had obtained from the dissecting rooms at University College Hospital Medical School.  He narrowly missed a custodial sentence under the Human Tissues Act 2004 (reported in the Daily Mirror 29/10/07).  I was told one woman successfully sued him in court for compensation when he had fraudulently led her to believe he was an osteopath to sell her his services.  He had the same name as a qualified and registered osteopath.  Testimony is published in the letters page of Osteopathy Today December 2007/January 2008.

• GOsC turned a blind eye and refused to prosecute several osteopaths practising and advertising under the title Osteopath whilst not registered with the General Osteopathic Council (documented proof), which is supposed to be a criminal offence.  A number of osteopaths had complained to the GOsC about it.  Yet one osteopath, Graeme Hext, who was refused registration with the GOsC and who had covered his signage to obliterate the title osteopath told me he was pursued by the GOsC using their private investigators who removed the covers on his signage and alleged he was using the title osteopath.  I spoke to Graeme on the phone several times and met him in person. Graeme told me himself he was taken to court and ordered to pay £26,000 – he died in 2009 aged early 50’s.

• A chiropractor I interviewed had resigned his registration with the General Chiropractic Council in disgust. He said he was forced to undergo a psychiatric assessment because he refused to examine and treat a patient whom he had reason to believe was trying to defraud an insurance company. This chiropractor told me that the patient had made some allegations of inappropriate behaviour to the police against him and a police report that stated these allegations were false was withheld.

• A chiropractor told me the GCC tried to uphold allegations against her that she had injured a patient at a time when she was out of the country on a conference – she even had the used airline ticket and conference material to prove it.  It took a huge effort for her lawyer to get this charge dropped but the GCC convicted her of inadequate note-keeping and she was forced to undergo two practice audits which she had to pay for (£400 each!).  It has affected her well-being and her enjoyment of her profession.

• I interviewed Richard Lanigan who was elected onto the General Chiropractic Council in May 2007 on a mandate that the GCC was not fit for purpose. He was removed from council 9 months later for whistle blowing. He resigned from the GCC register in 2009, but continues to practice chiropractic in defiance of the regulator who have admitted sending private investigators into his clinic.  He has set up a blog www.chiropracticlive.com where he blogs about his own experience of regulatory incompetence. (Richard wrote this piece himself specially for this article)

• Osteopaths who have graduated with a degree in Osteopathy and refused registration by the GOsC and therefore not legally allowed to practice as osteopaths whilst osteopaths without any degree are registered with no quibble.  An osteopath who had three to five GP fundholder contracts and PCT contracts was flatly refused registration by the GOsC with no reason given.  Several cases involving reports of abuse and bullying of osteopaths by the GOsC, osteopaths hounded out of the profession, hounded to the extent that it damaged their health.  I have proof that the GOsC use private investigators to plant stooges.

• Inconsistency in how complaints are dealt with.  I was called as a witness to give evidence at a professional conduct hearing of an osteopath who had formal complaints of allegations of sexual assault brought by two different patients and he was acquitted with no fuss or bother – he was not hounded or anything like that. 

• I interviewed a practitioner who was both a physiotherapist registered with the Health Professons Council and an osteopath registered with the General Osteopathic Council.  He was accused of being “sexually motivated” when a female patient had pressured him into performing an intimate procedure against his advice to her.  She complained to the GOsC that although she had given consent she had withdrawn consent at some point during the procedure but had not told the osteopath.  He was suspended from practise for several months.  

If you are hauled up by one statutory regulatory body and you are registered with others you get hauled up before all of them.  This osteopath told me that the HPC struck him off and had prevented him from having his own evidence presented and the HPC panel admitted that they did not have anyone available with expertise to assess his case because it was an osteopathic consultation.  This osteopath resigned his registration with the GOsC because the stress of it was damaging his health.  He commented to me that the GOsC were more fair than the Health Professions Council!

“In a recent case, a speech and language therapist endured two years of hell before being found not guilty of his ‘crime’ of having given a handicapped boy extra sessions privately after their NHS contract of 6 sessions had ended: he had charged the family one pound per session.”  This is reported on the website Coalition Against Over-Regulation of Psychotherapy http://www.coregp.org/

When your profession becomes statutorily regulated:

• As a practitioner you kiss goodbye to your basic human rights. For example you can be deprived of your livelihood and refused state benefits.  If you try to defend yourself or call the police, if you are physically assaulted in your practice or even in your personal life you can be hauled up and convicted.

• You can be diagnosed with a “mental condition” for performing a good Samaritan act or being genuinely caring about your patients.

• You can be denied an opportunity to give your side of the story and evidence can be withheld, fabricated or tampered with, e.g. fabrication or withholding of Police reports.  Testimony of complete fabrication of complaints, kangaroo courts, coaching witnesses, etc., abound.

• You have no defence against:  malicious complaints, patients who just want to be mischievous, criminals, people on class A drugs, the mentally ill, etc.

• There can be psychiatric abuse and humiliation. The statutory healthcare regulatory bodies can over-ride medical opinion and make their own psychiatric diagnoses.  Dr Rita Pal has become an expert on the bullying of individuals by professional regulatory bodies through the abuse of mental health diagnosis, after she was subjected to a campaign of intimidation by the General Medical Council http://scientific-misconduct.blogspot.com/2007/01/lisa-blakemore-brown-colleagues-weigh.html

• You do not need to have a formal complaint against you to be struck off – you can be struck off on mere heresay.  You can do all the right things and be struck off or be put through a very traumatic ordeal for several months.

• The regulator even tries to prevent practitioners resigning from their register !

• The regulator deliberately give vague guidelines on Code of Practice and refuses any requests to clarify finer points of ethics.

• Even if you are found not guilty of a complaint brought against you by a patient the regulator will actively look to convict you of something else – commonly clinical note-keeping or your website.

• Your profession gets dumbed down from a holistic system of medicine to an auxillary discipline dealing with a small part of the body or a small set of conditions, so that it fits in with the allopathic structure.  For example osteopaths and chiropractors can be reduced to back pain technicians rather than holistic primary care physicians. Many osteopaths operate like a GP for their patients.  What they will do with homeopathy – the mind can only boggle!  A major emerging theme was pressure on practitioners to conform to the biomedical paradigm and getting rid of vitalists.

The above research was triggered by my own experiences with the General Osteopathic Council.  First of all they tried to refuse me registration after I had recently graduated from a 6-year training in osteopathy and had a previous biomedical background (degree in pharmacology and several years experience in the pharmaceutical industry). They maintained I had not provided evidence of safety and competency but repeatedly refused to tell me why.  At the same time I saw practitioners with much less former training and academic qualifications sail onto the register without a qualm.  One of the participants of this project told me that at that time the GOsC withheld about 700-800 osteopaths from full registration because they wanted to make sure qualified osteopaths from certain schools were “denied their right to vote” in the first council elections (confirmed by email from an osteopath involved in this at the time).

 In 2006/2007 the GOsC tried to strike me off “unlawfully” (Osteopathy Today, July 2007, page 6-7), after I did a Good Samaritan act and tried to get a patient to safety in what turned out to be a hoax emergency.  I was physically assaulted by the patient’s daughter who obstructed me from trying to help the patient who clearly had all the appearance of being under the influence of Class A drugs (dilated pupils and “hyper”). When they arrived she was sniggering, avoided eye contact with me and refused to cooperate from the outset. 

The GOsC had me assessed by an emeritus professor of psychiatry who assured them I was perfectly sane and fit to practice but the GOsC ignored this and maintained that I suffer with a “mental condition” or a “personality disorder”.  I have had to give an undertaking not to deal with emergencies in the future.  There was no formal complaint, only a telephone complaint of allegations of a fantastical nature that were not even physically possible!  These were that I threw the patient out after 5 minutes and then I spent 20 minutes circling the room holding a vase.  I locked all three of them (father, daughter and her boyfriend) in my waiting room (there is no lock on the door of my waiting room and never has been). That I stood on their car bonnet and smashed the wing mirrors (I’m still waiting for a civil claim!!).  That I lunged for the daughter’s handbag and purse.  

It was also alleged there was a dispute about the professional fee when at no point in the consultation had I asked for a fee.  The daughter and father started arguing about paying me and the GOsC blamed me for that.  The daughter started to become aggressive and threatening when I asked her to be a chaperone because she’d told me they had already been to Casualty and Casualty couldn’t help and been to their doctor etc. 

When she intially phoned me, she first said that her father had a stomach ulcer and I said I couldn’t help with that as it was beyond my expertise and after I had repeatedly told her I couldn’t help (for 5 minutes!) and was trying to end the phone call she started saying her father had severe head and neck pain and she was worried “he wouldn’t last the weekend”.  When I challenged her as to why she was persisting with this avenue with me when I had made it clear I didn’t want to get involved, she desperately begged and pleaded on the phone for my help saying he had severe head and neck pain and was worried he would not make it through the weekend but when they got to my practice the patient said he didn’t have any head or neck pain at all!  

It is a fact that the commonest reason for A&E physicians to be sued is misdiagnosis of meningitis and I know of a GP who misdiagnosed meningitis in her own child. Also a nurse or doctor is obliged to go out of their way to assist a member of the public in a medical emergency, even if they are not their patient otherwise they can be charged with negligence.  Thus I felt I had no choice but to relent to offer a basic “emergency triage” with the intention of phoning Casualty to get the patient fast-tracked.  First Aid protocol dictates that once you have initiated a duty of care you are obliged to follow through until the patient is in safe hands of Casualty, GP, Police, etc. 

The GOsC denied me any opportunity to tell my story before formal allegations were made and until after the psychiatric assessment which was approximately 6 months later and I had no idea what I was supposed to have done wrong.  The GOsC also lied barefaced in writing about the purpose of the psychiatric assessment.  To this day the GOsC refuse to tell me what I was supposed to have done wrong and what I should have done differently despite repeated petitions on my part.  The GOsC have even admitted in writing that they have no evidence to support their allegations and the complainant refused to formalise her complaint despite the GOsC pursuing them twice to do so!  The GOsC presented to the Investigating Committee and the psychiatrist an alleged “police statement” obtained more than a month after the incident accusing me of “purse pulling”.  I showed this to a detective at Bedfordshire Police CID and was assured by them this was not a legitimate police statement and they have never heard the term “purse-pulling”.  The most disturbing aspects of this case were that the GOsC have completely disregarded all the aspects pertaining to patient safety such as the boundaries of my duty of care, etc.

The GOsC justified their “investigation” because there was another telephone complaint in 2002 from a woman alleging I had tried to block her exit from my practice until she paid the fee, that I was hysterical and close to tears but she refused to formalise her complaint in writing.  In this case a man phoned my practice asking if I would see his daughter “who could barely walk” as soon as possible.  As soon as I had given an appointment time (which was my lunch break because I was busy!) he terminated the call and when I dialled 1471 to phone for the patient’s name, the number had been withheld.  When these people arrived the woman started shouting and flailing at me, drowning out all attempts on my part to speak and ran out the door (yet 2 hours ago she could barely walk!)  One of the allegations against me was that I had not advised the patient of my fees prior to the consultation.  So just how does one advise the patient of the fees before the consultation when they have terminated the call and withheld the number and what sort of person slams the phone down part way through a conversation?!

The GOsC ruled out any possibility that either of these complaints were malicious.  In both cases despite the GOsC’s repeated attempts to get the complainant to formalise their complaint they did not.  Moreover these complaints will be taken into account if there is any other future complaint against me.  Makes for feeling at ease in one’s practice doesn’t it!   The GOsC said they acted the way they did because of the “legislation”.

I am now frightened to administer First Aid or refer a patient to Casualty.  In 2008 a patient collapsed unconscious in my consulting room – I dared not do anything.  I told this to the GOsC in a letter and they didn’t bat an eyelid – so much for “patient protection” eh!!

Later, without my knowledge, the GOsC changed my registration to non-practising status which meant the public could not find me on the register – the GOsC said it was an “administrative error”.  The GOsC then published my email address and qualifications incorrectly on the register and after asking them to correct it twice, they have now deleted my email address.  They cannot even be trusted with simple administration.

It is extremely traumatic to be on the receiving end of this sort of onslaught and most practitioners who go through it have one or more aspects of their lives damaged.  Many of the practitioners I interviewed had lost their marriage, their family, their practice, their health.  One osteopath said “it’s like being hit by a train”.  One of the chiropractors I interviewed said that “it’s the nearest we have to Hitler and the Nazis”.   A study of suicide in doctors cited having a complaint as the most common causal factor especially in female doctors (Hawton et al, 2002).  An osteopath and a chiropractor I interviewed said “someone will be pushed to suicide soon”.  I have written to Gordon Brown, HRH Prince Charles, Dept. of Health, etc., to no avail and many other practitioners have complained to their MPs.

Despite my own traumatic experience with the GOsC and being a “vitalistic” practitioner, I went into this research genuinely open-minded as to what I might find. I wanted to know whether or not my experience was unique or typical.  I made strenuous endeavours to find practitioners who were in favour of their regulator to avoid/reduce sampling bias.  I found a chiropractor who although he had cases referred to the GCC’s Professional Conduct Committee (PCC), recognised the constraints within which the regulator had to function.  In his opinion the complaints mechanism is heavy handed and inflexible because once the legislation is set, it cannot easily be changed.  It is clear that the GCC Council and staff would like to ensure the process is proportionate but until recently were powerless to implement changes.  This looks set to change as a result of the Government’s wish to standardise the complaints mechanism across all regulators.  All the other practitioners I interviewed were not so generous and some of my raw data is much more damning than anything presented in this article which I had to water down for legal reasons.

The purpose of this article is not to apportion blame (that’s another debate) but to present evidence of statutory regulation causing unnecessary damage.  I myself have no axe to grind with the GCC, the GMC, the HPC as I have had no dealings with them and all that I have written here is what has been reported by others.  I can say of the GOsC that they seem to be a pussycat compared to the GCC and whilst I have always found their staff “polite” and they have never been verbally abusive to me, my experience is their processes are far from transparent and I feel far from supported in the care of my patients.  It seems like a bunch of people in suits in an office in London who are completely out of touch with how the profession works at the coalface.  Since statutory regulation of osteopaths I’ve felt held back and extremely frustrated professionally.  I feel less “supported” and “enabled” in caring for my patients under SR than I did under VSR.  The climate of fear created by SR discourages one from seeking clarification on the finer points of practice ethics and sharing with colleagues.  The heavy handedness of SR disables the practitioner and leads to defensive practice which can detract from patient care.  In a recent conversation I had with a GP we both agreed that healthcare regulation has become about serving the regulator at the expense of the patient – the patient becomes almost irrelevant!  The GP added: “multiply that by 4 and that’s how it is in the NHS”.

As homeopaths we regard “health” as the unrestricted expression of the vital force and the authenticity of uniqueness of the person.  Regulation is about standardisation, uniformity, conformity. If homeopaths sacrifice their own authenticity to gain “acceptance” then how can we assist our patients to authentic self-expression and health?

It is down to each practitioner to decide for themselves whether they choose to serve the regulator and gain “acceptance” and “recognition” or whether they serve their patient and turn their backs on “recognition”.  An increasing number of osteopaths and chiropractors are choosing the latter – some have formed a new discipline “osteomyeology” which has both former osteopaths and chiropractors on its register and which is gaining ground.  The GOsC and GCC have no jurisdiction over function, only title – one can practice what one has always practiced under a different title.  The GOsC and GCC may find they have hoisted themselves by their own petard if they upset too many practitioners and there is no one left to regulate!

If anyone wishes to contact me my email is This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it