Medical board chair explains why alternative medicine crackdown was ditched
Dr Anne Tonkin says complementary, alternative and emerging medicine is hard to define accurately
The Medical Board of Australia has no more plans to single out doctors offering complementary, alternative or unconventional medical treatments after abandoning its proposal for stand-alone guidelines.
It’s been two years since the board unveiled its draft code, which explicitly warned doctors against providing treatments without a “reasonable expectation” of clinical benefit.
The subsequent consultation attracted a record-breaking 13,000 public submissions — plus condemnation from vitamins mogul Marcus Blackmore.
Board chair Dr Anne Tonkin said the board had stepped back from adopting the guidelines when “we realised it’s not the case that an area of medicine is risky”.
