Your mileage may vary on how convincing a rebuttal this is:
I put these two claims to the MHRA, who have just come back to me with this response.
Not once, either by an MCA/MHRA inspector or a regulatory official, were we advised to remove the kits from sale and the issue has not arisen until now when a small group of sceptics started lobbying the MHRA." with the MCA fully aware at both regulatory and inspection level.
It also should be noted that both we and our competitors had supplied unlicensed kits since the early 1990s. "Because of this lack of progress despite numerous enquiries and eventually a complaint letter, we considered that it was not worth us continuing with an expensive and slow process when the MCA did not consider the issue of unlicensed kits to be a priority.
#Helios homeo series#
In a rather angry response dated September 27th, Helios claimed that attempts to register a further 18 remedies between 20 failed due to the MHRA's (then known as the MCA) inability to conduct assessments, and leveled a series of accusations:
#Helios homeo plus#
On September 5th last year, the MHRA wrote to Helios Homeopathics Ltd explaining that they had received "a number of complaints" and pointed out that of the five Helios Homeopathic Kits being marketed to practitioners - the Basic kit, Basic Plus kit, Accident & Emergency kit (!), Child Birth kit (!!) and Travellers Kit - only the Basic kit could "currently be marketed." The MHRA asked Helios to "discontinue the sale and supply" of the rest, on the basis that the kit names are not approved by the MHRA, and "the kits contain remedies that are not registered or authorised." I was curious to know whether the companies had been in contact with the MHRA, and last week I received a response to a Freedom of Information Act request asking for copies of any correspondence. The most vulnerable points in the supply chain are the major homeopathic pharmacies, companies like Ainsworths, Helios and Nelsons who manufacture the bulk of remedies supplied to British homeopaths, and against whom complaints were made to the MHRA by Simon Singh's ' Nightingale Collaboration', a skeptic campaign organization.Īndy Lewis has been documenting the panicked responses of companies like Ainsworths, who have belatedly called upon their customers to lobby MPs - fairly futile as UK law is in line with an EU directive that would also need amending. The MHRA regulate homeopathy, and they are obliged to enforce the law if they receive complaints.
#Helios homeo free#
God forbid that regulation should get in the way of the Coalition's fetishism of free choice.įortunately it turns out that the government don't really have a choice in the matter. This would constrain consumer choice and, more importantly, risk the introduction of unregulated, poor quality and potentially unsafe products on the market to satisfy consumer demand If regulation was applied to homeopathic medicines as understood in the context of conventional pharmaceutical medicines, these products would have to be withdrawn from the market as medicines. At the time the government protested that: We only have the Society's description of that meeting, but it fits with the Coalition's rejection of Parliament's homeopathy 'evidence check' - short version: "We checked, there wasn't any!" - almost exactly two years ago.
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