ATMS ex-President says 'Hands off Complementary Medicine'

HypnosisAustralia, November 2007

By Dr Tracie O'Keefe DCH, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Psychotherapist & Counsellor
Editorial Director of HypnosisAustralia Online.

Sandi Rogers, an ex-President of the Australian Traditional Medicine Society (ATMS), recently called for the government not to register complementary practitioners at the society's AGM in Perth. She is quoted on a press release issue by the ATMS as saying, "The current popularity and growth of Natural Therapies must not be hindered by well-meaning but inappropriate moves by some to have government-registered practitioners." Ms Rogers called on all political parties not to head down the disastrous track of trying to register traditional medicine practitioners, and she was also referring to hypnotherapists who are members of the ATMS. The ATMS is the largest organisation representing traditional medicine practitioners with over 11,000 members and also represents over 30 colleges.

The ATMS is presently running a roadshow around the country canvasing the opinions of their members in different states. The ATMS often tries to justify non-registration by saying that none of their therapies can be harmful but in reality that cannot be true. Any practising hypnotherapist knows that bad hypnotherapy can severely disturb people send them into depression and even cause suicidal ideations, apart from the physical and social harm brought on by inappropriate suggestions during treatment. Furthermore bad massage can cause injuries to people or careless administration of herbs can even cause death. So the 'see no evil, hear no evil and feel no evil' approach could not really pass muster with any seriously educated health professional.

One idea that the ATMS is floating is what is call 'Government Monitored Self Regulation'. This would be where non-government-registered professions ran their own registers and the government monitored that the associations were carrying out their professional duties of accreditation, sanction, constant monitoring of their members' further education, training standards and supervision. This idea does have certain attractive features in that it would allow those professions to breathe and grow without the government interfering and curtailing the ways in which they practised their profession. There is a great fear for many professions that they will be placed under the eye of a GP who does not understand what they do or how they administer their treatments. Certainly many of the treatments administered by complementary or alternative practitioners are in stark opposition to how allopathic medical practitioners are forced to practise as a condition of their membership of AMA or because their insurance would be invalidated otherwise. The GP as the ultimate overseer would not allow those complementary treatments to be administered.

Other problems cited by the ATMS are what has happened to acupuncture practitioners in Victoria in the past five years where they have been forced to be government-registered practitioners. It costs those practitioners thousands of dollars more a year in insurance and registration fees to operate and after all this time they have still not been awarded Medicare rebates for their patients.

There are of course many practitioners and academics who believe that all healthcare practitioners should be on government register. Their argument is that the public have a right to guaranteed standards from anyone hanging out their shingle as healthcare practitioners. This logic cannot, however, always hold up since over the past few years there have been countless cases of malpractice by medical practitioners reported in the press and some of them have been board-certified but it has sometimes turned out that they did not even have medical degrees. One of the arguments put forward by ATMS is correct though: that state regulation does not work and that only a federally coordinated policy by the government on how to protect the public from rogue practitioners would stand any chance of being successful.

©HypnosisAustralia, November 2007