Allergic to freedom

To what problem is the statutory regulation of herbalists a solution? Are the tiny bits of bark and sap and leaf peddled by contemporary wisewomen deleterious to human health? Are we at risk of being sterilised by St John’s wort, paralysed by pau d’arco, maddened by meadowsweet? Hardly. Herbal remedies might be inert placebos or they might, as my wife maintains, be better for you than antibiotics. My wife is often right; and in any case, as the author of Proverbs tells us, ‘better a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith’ (rarely could the bit about the herbs have applied so aptly).

In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter whether complementary medicine lives up to its billing. This isn’t about science; it’s about freedom. Our starting assumption ought surely to be that herbal practitioners have no interest in killing their customers. Their wares tend to be milder than the pharmaceutical alternatives, and have often been prescribed for centuries. If they were toxic, I think we’d have noticed by now. Six million people in Britain have visited a herbalist at some point in the past two years, and two million regularly use alternative treatments as a first resort, yet herbal remedies account for just 0.4 per cent of reported adverse reactions.

When pushed on this point, defenders of the new rules — which come into force on 1 May — sometimes point half-heartedly to a death involving Chinese medicine; yet that case involved the adulteration of the advertised substance. It was, in other words, a violation of the existing trading standards laws.

No, the real reason that the government is obliging all herbal practitioners to sell only approved products is that it is carrying out instructions from Brussels. The ban was voted through the European Parliament seven years ago but, as so often, Eurocrats built in a delay, knowing that national ministers were far more likely to agree to an unpopular measure that would blow up in the laps of their successors.