The EU and Public Health

Last week we sent all our customers a newsletter on how the EU is hugely damaging your right to take natural medicines of your choice, and how your access to information and opinion on how they might help you had been restricted, also by our membership of the EU. Today we discuss how EU directives interfere with conventional medicine, and the provision of the NHS. Most of this newsletter is adapted from, and in many parts copied word for word from a speech given by Professor Angus Dalglish, an oncology doctor working in the NHS. The full speech, which contains further information can be viewed here

The EU Clinical Trials Directive

20 years ahead the NHS will not be viable in any shape or form unless we address these issues….The currrent NHS structure cannot cope….All improvements to improve patient care are thwarted by regulatory burdens. They want us to improve everything at the coalface and then shackle us and straightjacket us with this. The main problem is the blind acceptance of European Union Directives without thinking through the consequences – the law of unintended consequences.

What got me here, was my frustration with the EU Clinical Trials Directive. It was meant to be brought in to harmonise research, but it has ended up destroying academic medicine in this country –  a field in which we were world leaders. This has resulted in several reports from the professional bodies [opposing this directive]. One of them, from the Academy of Medical Sciences (of which I am a fellow), have done a lovely document to the government pointing out the problems, leaving no stone unturned and we still haven’t had any kind of response to it.

Before this came in I could do all sorts of trials with simple cheap drugs vaccines etc that might improve outcomes and we could do it in academic centres. It was easy getting this done. When the EU Clinical Trials Directive was pointed out to me, I said to the government, the MHRA, the Presidents of the College of Physicisans and pathologists etc that this could be a disaster. They patted me on my head, virtually, and said “don’t worry, it won’t happen, it’s just sort of a tidying up exercise”. Then what happened when it came in? I get told I can’t do this, I can’t do that. I went to see these guys and tell them you agreed, you promised, but they’ve all gone. They’ve all retired. They’ve brought in new people who say “well, these are the rules”.

So to do a trial now, and this is no word of exaggeration, because I just tried to cost one up, it’s coming in at £2m to do a study, that previously cost about £50,000! How can you possibly justify that if you’re not a big pharmaceutical company? The label on the tin was to harmonise clinical research and protect the patient. But in reality it increasingly looks like a cartel to protect big pharma and to keep competition from generics and academics out. The result is that much clinical research is being done elsewhere, and the patients lose out. This was the thing that really got to me.

I had to go to an All Party Parliamentary Committee on Cancer care, and I said It’s absolutely pointless addressing any of these things [which I had gone to talk about] unless you get rid of The EU Clinical Trials Directive, and the patients are losing out. We used to have a world class lead on this, but now unless its the drugs companies behind it, we can’t do anything.

EU Working Time Directive and the NHS

If you think that’s bad enough, there are other European Directives that are just destroying the NHS. Until we get rid of them, we just cannot get the NHS the way we want it. Take the Working Time Directive. It limits the amount of hours that people are allowed to work in a week. But it’s impossible to do that with a health care system. But our government have said “this is how it is”. To do this, you need to plan for about 20 years, and employ three times the number of doctors we currently have overnight! Because of this directive, people aren’t being trained properly. I don’t know any surgeon now who would want to be operated on by one of their young colleagues. Someone phoned me when they heard I was giving this speech, and said “It’s even worse than you think. We’ve just appointed a consultant colo-rectal surgeon who has only done four colectomy (removal of the colon) operations in his life”. We did this before we (even) became registrars!  It has inflicted utter chaos on the health care system.

The EU freedom of movement directive, and your health.

The freedom to move from one country to another is a great ideal. If you’ve got a set amount of doctors, nurses etc how can you then deliver the service for a demand which goes up exponentially? In reality when one country provides everything free at the point of service, including treatments which are unavailable altogether in about a third of EU countries, how can you blame people from coming here from abroad to get treatment? Of course people from outside will want to access this if they can. Merion Thomas, an NHS surgeon recently wrote about the flagrant abuse of the NHS by those who are not entitled to it and the massive savings that would be made if this was stopped. The obvious solution is that the NHS should only be free at the point of service to those that have paid into it. Others will have to take out insurance or pay. What we are heading towards is a situation where EU Freedom of Movement directives, and the resultant health tourism cause so much pressure on the NHS that no amount of money put into it would maintain the service.

EU freedom of movement and free movement of doctors

This again is a great idea in theory. But this was not meant to be a loophole for foreign doctors with dubious degrees from other EU countries who are unable to communicate in English to come and work here.  Now the GMC has decreed that doctors must pass an English competency test before working here?  Why was this not done before? How many people had to die before this was done?

The transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is something almost nobody – even in the health industry has heard of (yet) – and most people will only do so when it is too late. Interestingly, the highly unlikely alliance of Friends of the Earth and the UK Indepedence Party are strongly opposing this deal although the three mainstream parties support it. TTIP is supposed to be a free trade agreement between the European Union (EU) and the United States (USA), which all sounds rather nice in theory. But the reality is less nice.

Firstly it will be a disaster for our NHS as it will allow back door privitisation, and favour the interests of the pharmaceutical companies over and above the public good and public health. Secondly, and even more ominously it will restrict, and possibly end entirely the controls we have over genetically modifed (GM) food in our fields and shops.

Regarding the first point, as stated on one web site “The analysis of the 5 most worrying proposals of the pharmaceutical industry’s wish list for the EU-US trade agreement reveals a real threat to European public health systems and democracy. A report by the Commons Network and civil society partners shows that the pharmaceutical industry’s wish list for the TTIP is detrimental for public health, will increase the cost of medicines and undermines democratic processes.”

This agreement is being negotiated by the EU (supposedly on our behalf) and we will be forced to abide by what they agree. That’s without any consultation with, or accountablility to the British people.  We believe this is unethical and unconscionable. 

Everyone who cares about their good health should read this newsletter, as well as Part II which we will be sending out in about a week.

Perhaps you think that the EU doesn’t affect your life, and rights. And perhaps you don’t think it matters if 75% of our laws are drafted by and then implemented by entirely unelected officials, who are not accountable to single person on the planet

That’s fine. But if you feel that having the right to take the health supplements of your choice, the right to be provided information on them, the freedom to take responsibility for, and make decisions for yourself about your health are important liberties, or that companies should have the freedom to publish legitimate opinion, provide traditional usage descriptions, and well documented information, then you would be highly mistaken not to be informed about some of the terrible EU laws that oppose these fundamental rights. The following directives affect us all, whether we like it or not.

• The Food Supplements Directive (2002/46/EC). This directive requires all legally available nutrients to be on a rather arbitrary positive list in order to be allowed to be sold and consumed. As far as we could see, it seemed to depend primarily on whether that form of nutrient happened to be available in Germany at the time. In 2009 it was estimated that around 300 nutrients were banned by this irksome directive, though the real figure would be much higher given the fact that it completely blocked new forms of vitamins and minerals from coming onto the market. Examples include many perfectly safe and effective forms of magnesium, selenium and chromium. Although the situation is bad, this is set to become far worse if the Maximum Permitted Dosage levels for vitamins and minerals get set at useless Mickey mouse levels, which is a serious possibility at the next stage of implementation. Several organisations, including an entity called “Health Europe”, which is in reality an organisation lobbying on behalf of the bunch of self-interested pharmaceutical companies who have no interest whatsoever in public health, who actually fund this “organisation”,  are lobbying for maximum levels to be set at EU RDA levels, which will be useless for any kind of therapeutic usage – as well as a direct assault on your freedom of choice. It has been claimed that this market was completely unregulated before this directive (and the next one I am going to talk about) came in. But this is nonsense. Vitamins, minerals and herbs were regulated by the Drugs Act 1968, and personally I don’t remember noticing too many dead bodies lying about in the streets because someone or other took a high dosage Vitamin C tablet prior to 2009. Yes, it was light touch regulation, reflecting how safe most vitamins, minerals, herbs and other natural products usually were – but it was never unregulated. This is a total myth.

• The Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive (2004/24/EC) – in essence this is a spiteful and vindictive directive designed to protect the vested interests that successfully campaigned for it, which has created a huge black market where none previously existed. This directive has led to a tripling of the cost of many herbs, and their pharmaceuticalisation. Many have been banned outright. Many more have been chemicalised and pharmaceuticalised until they bare almost no resemblance to the 2000 year old traditions of herbal medicines, and contain all sorts of artificial chemicals which are at best questionable, and in some cases dangerous. We tried very hard to object to this horrible directive, but without success. You can read more about it here including the latest news. Before this directive came in, some clearly dangerous herbs were banned under the Drugs Act 1968 (and some others banned we think unfairly) along with psychoactive drugs like marijuana (which itself is a very controversial ban). But on the whole consumers were relatively free to buy what they wanted, and sellers relatively free to provide products. But with the new directive, the EU seems determined to stop you from actually making decisions for your yourself, about your body. Perhaps they fear that you might make the decisions that don’t serve their vested interests – just as some people genuinely believe we should never have a democratic vote on our membership of the EU (formed as a result of the 1991 Maastrict Treaty, when the EEC became the EU, which nobody was consulted on either), lest you vote the wrong way.

• The EU Labeling Directives (2003 and updated in 2014) which if strictly enforced could make more or less all non EU imports illegal to sell, for reasons as petty as the font size on the label not complying the required size, the ingredients not being listed in the required order, or wording such as “expiry date” instead of “best before” on the label. Can the rules really get any more petty and frivolous than this? Presumably this rule is there because they think you are too thick to know what the words “expiry date” rather than “best before” mean. Mercifully, the UK authorities don’t seen to be enforcing this with an iron fist, and have avoided harassing companies over trivial nonsense so far, but who knows what’s around the corner? Certainly these regulations enable the powers that be to put companies out of business overnight – through the harsh enforcement of EU directives. And regardless of who it is claimed to help, who benefits from this in reality? The consumer? Or big pharma?

• The Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation (No 1924/2006) – This is the nastiest and cruellest of the lot. This is the directive which has made it illegal to say anything meaningful about virtually everything – leading to the total ban on the claims that water hydrates the body, or that prunes help with constipation – and tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers money spent on arriving at these preposterous conclusions. With some of the products we provide, this has led to an up to 90% drop in sales.This is the directive which caused products such as Optibac Probiotics For Bowel Calm (a nice and clear product name) to have to be renamed “Saccromyces Boulardii” (which is completely meaningless or ordinaryt people). Similarly Optibac Probiotics For A Flat Stomach to had to be renamed “One week flat”. That’s because even the name of the product was deemed an illegal health claim. If you are finding it hard to find useful information on the supplements you are interested in, or which supplements might help you, or why you end up with no choice but to view third party, non EU based web sites to obtain information, blame this directive. Blame the EU. The idea, perhaps noble of protecting the consumer, has ended with a Draconian directive which makes publishing legitimate opinion into a crime, and bans companies even telling you what scientific research has found – unless the European Food Standards agency gives you permission to do so, and of course only after they have spent up to a million Euros submitting a single health claim. This is impossible for small to medium sized companies like the Finchley Clinic – the businesses all the mainstream political parties agree are the life-blood of the economy, yet where it comes to protecting them from petty EU regulations when they are in power, at best do nothing, and at worse encourage it! Result: the industry is becoming more and more disincentivised to even try to provide worthwhile, helpful information. So when you find that the information available on a nutrient is that it “contributes to normal energy-yielding metabolism”, instead of something that is actually useful for you to know i.e.. what it may help with…it’s not the industry who are to blame – it’s the unelected EU commissioners, on their rather comfortable over £300,000 per year (plus expenses) salaries.

• The Human Medicinal Products Directive (Directive 2001/83/EC). This directive can make any food, food supplement or cosmetic a drug at a regulator’s discretion – anything which has “a physiological effect”, or is claimed to have. This of course makes anything, theoretically even water into a medicine! After all, if you tried to avoid water for more than two or three days, you’d soon learn whether or not it has a physiological effect, even if as according to the EU geniuses, it does not hydrate the body!

Words would be inadequate to describe how heartbreaking it is for us to be banned from providing many safe, effective natural health products and to tell you what they actually do even when we can sell them. And even more heart breaking for your health to be compromised as a result. Even more so in view of the estimated 40,000 deaths per year conservatively estimated by University College, London to occur in the UK as a result of CORRECTLY prescribed medical drugs (the numbers are even higher when the death rate for badly prescribed drugs is added to this).

(Source: Daily Telegraph December 19 1999. Similar article Daily Telegraph 30 Nov 2008).

However there is an alternative to having to comply with EU regulations which pose a threat to your health, your freedom of choice, and access to information. The alternative is to leave the EU, and be done with it. In the good old days, was there anything that bad about having our laws made by people who we actually elected, and can throw out if they do a lousy job? Call me old fashioned, but I rather like our laws to be made by democratically elected British politicians rather than unelected bureaucrats, who for all we know, have never even stepped on British soil, and have no reason to be especially concerned with what is best for the UK.

In the forthcoming general election, as the company director, me and most of our staff’s voting choices will be determined by what has been been done over the last 10 years to the industry we love and cherish as our direct result of our EU membership, and the resultant directives. These have all been rubber stamped without so much as whimper of protest by any government, whether from the left or right. (In fairness, they didn’t have much choice, as it is against EU law, not to pass and implement EU law – and it OVERIDES our own laws, whether we like it or not). If your health, not to mention your freedom of choice is important to you, please consider the points raised in this newsletter in who you choose to vote for, and pass this newsletter on to anyone else you think would want to know about what is going in the natural health sector.

In my next newsletter, I will tell you about the breathtaking damage being done to the NHS as a result of yet more inept and counter-productive EU regulations. If you thought that the EU was only harassing the natural health industry, you’d be wrong. In my naivity, this is what I used to think too, until I did some research. The damage being done to public health and the conventional treatment you get on the NHS as a result of yet more EU nonsense which simply doesn’t work – The EU Clinical Trials Directive, The Working Time Directive, Freedom of Movement Directive and other EU drivel is equally remarkable as the damage being done to the natural health industry. Look out for The EU and The Damage to Your Health and Freedom Part II – coming to a computer near you soon!

Mark G. Lester – Company Director – The Finchley Clinic Ltd – www.thefinchleyclinic.com