Bob
Senior Member
- Messages
- 16,455
- Location
- England (south coast)
If someone is claiming that they are implementing a successful medical 'treatment', and that they have cured people, without medical evidence to support those claims, then they are carrying out a confidence trick. That's a fact. There's no grey area here. We have fairly robust systems in place so that these sorts of unsubstantiated claims cannot be made. Such claims have enormous potential to exploit and harm vulnerable patients. It's simply not permissible to make unsubstantiated claims re medical treatments. If it were permissible, then everyone would be setting up companies and using unsubstantiated promotional material to sell their (superficially feasible-sounding) fake products. It's not ethical and it's not legally permissible to sell a 'treatment' that isn't a treatment. If I were to set myself up as a witch doctor and claim that I could cure cancer, it would be illegal, unethical and dangerous. And it would be a confidence trick and a fraud. No question about it. No one can claim that they have a treatment for an illness without robust medical evidence. And interventions usually have to be tested for safety as well as efficacy, so that patients aren't harmed (although they seem to ignore the safety side of things when it comes to psycho-social interventions.)
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