John Bremner and Anna Sawkins, partners in the UK-based innovative alternative health company, Sweet Cures of York, are leading a call for clinical trials of new drugs to also test the drugs against natural remedies, both new and traditional.

This, Anna says, "Would solve at a stroke the appalling situation where a drug is accepted and brought into use just by virtue of having been 'trialled' even though its performance was barely better than placebo, and is then the preferred choice for treating whatever disorder it is aimed against."

She makes the point that if the new drug and its side effects had been tested against one or more natural remedies, as well as against placebo, the trial would put the drug in its true perspective. "You could well find that a new drug is more effective and has less side effects than treating the problem naturally," he says, "but the opposite could also be discovered, and wouldn't that be a great thing to know?"

Testing new drugs against natural remedies would also, at a stroke, solve the problems of the providers of natural health solutions not being able to afford the huge costs of well-run clinical trials. The information revealed would be invaluable to our sum of knowledge about natural remedies, not only about what works, but about what doesn't work.

John Bremner reinforces the point, "The public really want this. There is a huge need for people to know what works and what doesn't work, and traditional, natural and food-based remedies don't have the evidence-base needed for people, therapists, and doctors to be able to determine the best way to treat particular problems."

They suggest that trials could also include nutrition and lifestyle change treatment options. So for example, if a new drug to slow or reverse the progress of colon cancer is being proposed, wouldn't it be great to know if doing 10 minutes exercise a day, going on an organic diet and taking high doses of flax-seed oil achieved a result that equalled or bettered the drug being tested?

What if just taking a plate of porridge or a tablespoon of olive oil in the morning worked better than the proposed new drug?

The idea behind their proposal is to uncover these possibilities. As John Bremner continues, "To compare a new drug to placebo is great, but let's compare proposed new drugs to our huge legacy of natural health cures. The pharmaceutical industry is barely a hundred years old and does not have all the answers - which is one reason they are busy trying to harvest and patent the active ingredients of natural products that they already know to be effective. Natural remedies and lifestyle answers to health problems are based on a legacy of thousands of years of trial and error, finding out what works and what doesn't work."

To quote James Duke, PhD, (The Herbal Insider) discussing whether natural remedies work as well as drugs, or better, "Until Tamoxifen and Raloxifene are compared to standardized bean soup (40 milligrams of isoflavones per cup) and/or to kudzu (our best source of the natural phyto-estrogen, daidzein) no one knows for sure--not you, me or the ACS."

There would seem to also be a case for extending the new guidelines to cover surgical trials. For example, olive oil and lemon juice are traditionally used to get rid of gall stones. Logically it would seem to make sense to test the risks of the operation to remove the gall bladder against this natural method of making them slip out of the body.

And again, isolated rare sugars or combinations of these can reverse antibiotic resistant kidney, urinary tract, bladder, and prostate infections that allopathic treatment finds difficult or impossible to address without causing the individual long-lasting damage. Should alternative remedies not be tried before a kidney is allowed to deteriorate to the point where it needs to be removed?

One of the points John Bremner and Anna Sawkins are making is that the pharmaceutical industry will also benefit from their suggested incorporation of natural remedies rather than just placebo into trials. New drugs are often arrived at by extracting active ingredients from plants that have been traditionally used as remedies. If a pharmaceutical company is successful in deriving a new drug that is more effective than, say, a tea made from the leaf or flower of the plant, then they can prove that point in the clinical trial. It will also show up natural or traditional remedies that don't work better than placebo, adversely affect the condition being treated, or produce significant side effects.

On the other hand, if the pharmaceutical industry is allowed to continue ignoring alternative remedies in its clinical trials, we are in danger of losing them altogether as the industry uses its enormous financial influence and lobbying power to bury all alternative remedies so deep in the mire of complex legislation and regulatory costs, that no provider of alternative remedies or healthcare will be able to survive.

To Take Further Action: In the UK you can write to the Health Minister Dawn Primarolo, and propose that the guidelines for conducting clinical trials should be amended to include trialling of natural remedies alongside placebo. It's exactly the right time, because she is currently working on new legislation to make drug companies more accountable.