 |
Snake Oil Salesmen Hit Jackpot in Nevada |
|
An Open Letter to Nevada State Government Officials, sent 9/12/07 Annotated response from Board of Medical Examiners, updated 10/28/07 Snake Oil Salesmen, History
Nevada State Board of Medical Examiners:
We'd like to protect the public, but... Over the years, the homeopaths have consistently pressured the legislature to permit them to push treatments that go far beyond the ordinarily benign methods of homeopathy. Oddly, though, it has been the Medical Board, not the Homeopathic Board, which has done the most to expand the scope of homeopathic practice in Nevada. The Homeopathic Board has succeeded in adding a few questionable treatments to a short list of allowable alternative therapies, but the homeopaths have never actively enforced state regulations because they have never disciplined any licensee since their Board was created. It would, in fact, have been impossible for them to respond to complaints from the public because the Homeopathic Board had no written policies or procedures in place until late last year. In line with its utter failure to meet the expectations of an ordinary regulatory body, the Homeopathic Board has spent most of its existence mired in disputes among its members, maintaining a level of self-absorbed incompetence that seems appropriate to its licensees' faith in "electrodermal screening," "thought-field therapy," "dark field microscopy," and other treatments that defy objective analysis. The Homeopathic Board has sometimes sent letters to non-homeopathic practitioners admonishing them not to impinge on homeopathic practice, and the Board has also warned licensees that their licenses would be rescinded if they did not pay fees. In one case, that of Katrina Tang, the Homeopathic Board did address a case of extensive misconduct. However, the Board responded to the injuries that Tang had inflicted on her patients at Dr. James Forsythe's Century Clinic in Reno, not by investigating any of the 18 complaints that had been filed against her, but by reaching a purely voluntary agreement with her to "begin the process of retirement." Thus, the Homeopathic Board has not, at least as far as can be ascertained from public records, imposed a fine or any other penalty on any homeopathic physician or advanced practitioner of homeopathy in response to reported misconduct, nor has it ever found any practitioner guilty of any violation of the rules of homeopathic care. The Medical Board, on the other hand, has vastly increased the scope of homeopathy by allowing dually licensed doctors to engage in a wide variety of practices that are technically illegal, but which the Medical Board has characterized as homeopathic rather than allopathic medicine. More specifically, in its ongoing effort to wash its hands of as many complaints as possible, the Medical Board has typically responded to complaints filed against dually licensed physicians by arguing that these practitioners are immune from supervision due to their special status as homeopaths. For instance, in disposing of a complaint filed last year against Frank Shallenberger, MD, HMD, who runs the Center of Alternative and Anti-Aging Medicines in Carson City, Medical Board attorney Bonnie Brand asserted without qualification, "Our Board does not have any jurisdiction or power over homeopathic physicians or the practice of homeopathy." In contending that the Medical Board's hands are tied, Brand was apparently looking for some excuse to close a case without conducting any proper investigation, which seems to be the Board's usual approach to complaints. However, in her effort to clear her desk, Brand directly contradicted the Medical Board's general claims that it has primary jurisdiction over homeopathic doctors when these physicians are also licensed MD's. This long-standing policy was reiterated by Medical Board representative Keith Lee in testimony before the Assembly Committee on Commerce and Labor in March 2007. Lee objected to proposed legislation that would have required the Medical Board to work with the Homeopathic Board to determine which board ought to to address complaints against dually licensed physicians. According to Lee, the Medical Board could never accept this parity because it would impinge on its fundamental duty to supervise its own licensees:
Unfortunately, however interested the Medical Board may be in maintaining its regulatory authority, it is evidently more concerned about protecting incompetent doctors and quashing a maximum number of complaints. Consequently, rather than consulting Nevada state law, which confines homeopathic practice to a limited set of therapies, the Medical Board deals with specific complaints by leaving it to accused doctors to decide what should or should not be identified as homeopathy. As a result, dually licensed MD's who would otherwise face disciplinary action escape penalty by claiming, after the fact, that whatever they were doing fell within the bounds of their homeopathic credentials. The upshot of this strange situation is that the Medical Board has significantly stretched what counts as homeopathy in Nevada. It has, for example, recognized "intravenous infusion," along with "chelation therapy," as an allowable legal homeopathic practice even though the legislature deliberately removed both of these terms from the list of alternative therapies that were permitted under AB286, a bill that revised the definition of homeopathy in 1997:
|
