Dear Editor
I write this wearing the hat of Outreach Coordinator for Our Health Our Choice. Composed of individual practitioners, patients, small business owners and employees, and concerned citizens, Our Health Our Choice is a new group/movement which exists to oppose passage of the Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill (TPMB) now before Parliament. Our Health Our Choice believes this bill, which would ratify a treaty with Australia, would severely compromise New Zealand sovereignty, unfairly burden thriving Kiwi businesses and gravely narrow consumer access to the broad spectrum of safe and effective conventional and alternative medicines now enjoyed. Although homeopathy and homeopathic remedies will be relatively protected and recognized no matter what next happens in the legislative arena, I believe all supporters of homeopathy are nonetheless obliged to demonstrate their opposition to the TPMB . . .
As a matter of principle, supporters of homeopathy should stand with our brethren, who include medical herbalists and naturopaths and practitioners of, ayurveda, traditional Chinese Medicine and traditional Maori healing. We understand that people must have the broadest possible choice in health care modalities, the path to health and well-being is unique and idiosyncratic. Homeopathy must have the modesty to admit that it alone is no panacea. For example, in the course of treating a patient prone to boils recently . . . I want my patients to be able to easily locate products such as these in a healthy, competitive marketplace: the best possible products at the lowest possible prices.
Under TPMB, any medicinal product, whether or not it bears an official seal of approval from trusted overseas agencies like the American FDA or the unofficial seal of a track record of hundreds, even thousands of years of safe use, will vanish from the shelves unless it also has or obtains approval from the ANZTPA, a process that costs tens of thousands of dollars per product. The ANZTPA is a corporate body and TPMB proposes one vote for New Zealand on this body to Australia’s four.
And finally there is the matter of New Zealand sovereignty, including our Treaty of Waitangi, which would be overridden by this international treaty. Even people who care not a whit for complementary and alternative medicine can find common ground with the Our Health Our Choice position here. As for me, I believe Kiwis can decide for themselves what is safe to sell in our country, bearing in mind that natural supplements have already demonstrated a safe track record here.
I agree that the practice of various modalities and the all-too-casual sale of some supplements, particularly herbs, may be due for some carefully-thought-out regulation, but TPMB does not do that. If the government is concerned with mortality in New Zealand, rather than enriching the pockets of big pharmacos and other large corporate concerns, then the Government must focus on the big killers in our country, many of which are preventable: hospital and prescription drug-related deaths; traffic accidents; and food-borne illnesses.
To get involved with this vitally important issue, I encourage you to contact your MP (the vote is expected soon) and your local news¬papers. Talk to your family, friends, neighbours and patients. Come as you are to Our Health Our Choice activities which will continue to occur in many urban centres throughout New Zealand. Email me at homeopath@avalor.com for more information and/or to be added to Our Health Our Choice’s contacts lists. A broad spectrum of New Zealand’s political parties, including the Greens, the Maori Party, ACT and National, oppose this bill. Surely the Government must be made to see that TPMN is bad medicine for New Zealand before we enter into an irrevocable treaty arrangement.
Julia Schiller
Auckland
After consultation with the executive committee of the NZ Homœopathic Society I can state that the Society’s stance is that, as an entity, its policy is not to be seen to endorse every other form of healing found in NZ which may be affected by a TPM Act. Of course individual members of the Society may do as they wish, but as an organisation we have focused throughout every phase of development of this proposed Act on what is best for homœopathy, and no other form of healing.
This may seem unreasonable to some people, who might wish the Society to give financial or other support to the protest movement, or one of its elements - but our wish is to avoid any possibility that we may be associated in the mind of legislators or the public as on par with some easily-ridiculed therapy or one with an even worse record than homœopathy for having its name sullied by real and self¬styled practitioners whose failings are reported in the media.
The draft legislation is one of the most ill-written, badly conceived, pieces of law making New Zealand has ever seen; its defects go beyond making it difficult, if not impossible, for some health products to stay on our shelves, but raise concerns over such things as some sunscreens’ availability; it inflicts onerous patent rules that are a spin-off from Australia’s free-trade agreement with the US; it imposes elements of the Australian legal system on us; and so on and so on. The special status of Maori medicine afforded by interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi seem not to have been adequately addressed, and the claim that it is primarily to protect the life and health of consumers of alternative medicine is patently false.
Bruce Barwell