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Healthfoods and supplements?
NHS and private medicine?
The government and the drug companies?
These days, who can you trust?
HealthWatch is a voluntary non-profit making body whose members include doctors, lawyers, scientists, health workers and journalists.
The formal objects in our constitution include the development of good practices in the assessment and testing of treatments and the conduct of clinical trials generally and the promotion of high standards of health care by practitioners.
Our honorary president is Nick Ross; patrons are The Baroness Greenfield OBE, Professor Tom Kirkwood, Lord Dick Taverne and Lord Walton of Detchant
Our chairman is Dr James May; past chairmen have included Professor David Bender, Professor John Garrow, Malcolm Brahams, and the late Dr Thurstan Brewin, the oncologist and medical writer.
Our committee includes medical and biomedical scientists, medical journalists, practising clinicians and lawyers. All the officers and the committee work without payment, except the editor of our newsletter (a professional journalist) and the membership secretary, who receive a small fee.
We rely primarily on our members' subscriptions. We have received generous donations from a number of individuals and charitable trusts who sympathise with our aims.
Definitely not. We are completely independent of the pharmaceutical industry (or any other group or lobby) and we are determined to remain so. Our publications carry no advertising.
On the other hand, we do need money to carry on our activities so we are prepared to accept donations from the pharmaceutical industry. However, to preserve our independence, we have resolved as a matter of policy that not more than 25% of our income in any year may come from any one company.
We may appear to target the alternative sector, but our aim is to be impartial and to help the public become better informed about all types of treatment. We want to know if a treatment is effective and safe and we believe that proper controlled trials are the only way to establish this.
We realise that many patients sincerely believe that they have
been helped by unconventional or unproven treatment, particularly where the
more conventional treatment has failed. But if it works, why rely on an unhealthy
return to mysticism and ignore all that has been learned in the last hundred
years?
We only ask the practitioner to come forward and submit the treatment to a proper
scientifically devised trial to avoid the danger of coming to a false conclusion.
Certainly! For example, one newsletter article dealt with fraud in mainstream medicine and we are always concerned to receive and investigate examples of poor practice in conventional medicine.
This is emphatically not our intention. We are concerned that patients who urgently need proper medical attention are being diverted by people who offer bogus diagnoses or cures, this can give rise to tragic consequences, most obviously in the field of cancer. Who would disagree that it is in the public interest that these activities are investigated?
Our aim is to persuade and influence the public both directly and through the media. We publish a newsletter four times a year. This is circulated to the media and to our members. We offer the media a telephone helpline and a website upon which they can rely as a source of information on many health-related subjects.
We have a series of position papers in which one of our members or supporters who is an expert on a particular subject prepares a paper which we discuss and then issue as HealthWatch policy.
The HealthWatch Award is made annually to a clinician or journalist who has made an outstanding contribution to our aims and objectives
The HealthWatch student prize is awarded annually to nursing
and medical students for the critical analysis of clinical research protocols.
HeathWatch is a longstanding registered charity (Registered Charity no 1003392) with an authoritative and international membership. It encourages scientific testing of conventional, complementary and alternative medicine and therapies. It has no connection with drug companies, or manufacturers of unlicensed health remedies, and receives no funds from vested interests.
You can see highlights of the four most recent HealthWatch Newsletters, and the full text of all Newsletters more than a year old by clicking the links on the left. From time to time, HealthWatch issues position papers on matters of current interest; there is a link to these position papers on the left.
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For reasons beyond our control the server that the HealthWatch pages are hosted on has changed, and with this change we have had to change the email address for the Newsletter editor to: newsletter1 @ healthwatch-uk.org
Copyright © 2008 HealthWatch. This page was updated on July 16, 2010
HealthWatch has no connection with any other organisations which now have a similar name. The Charity Commissioners have been made aware of the similar name chosen by HealthWatch (UK) which appears to be a small political lobby group with wholly different aims from our own.