Licences exist to protect us

I will not attempt to comment on GcMaf itself. It might be the greatest advance since Penicillin or perhaps the next Thalidomide. I do not have the knowledge to judge which. That is my point. Individual patients or even doctors can never have enough knowledge, information or even time to analyse the mountain of data needed to make a sensible decision about a new treatment.

It was the tragedy of Thalidomide that prompted governments all over the world to set up dedicated licensing authorities to collect all the information available about each treatment, including medicines, and decide whether it was effective and safe enough to be given a licence and made available to patients. You must bear in mind that a treatment that is ineffective, if used in place of one that does work, can be more damaging than one with serious side-effects.

All the world's licensing authorities cooperate and share data to ensure that any new information about treatments is not lost in the files in one country. These bodies have to try and achieve an impossible balance. On the one hand, they want to be sure they have all the information that enables them to be sure that a treatment is both effective and safe. On the other hand, they do not want to make the licensing process so difficult that manufacturers and instigators are prevented from bringing important new treatments to the market.

Even so, the cost of bringing a new treatment from laboratory to general use can be billions of pounds and yet there are still cases (some of which have already been quoted) where serious problems become apparent after a new treatment has been used for some time. When such problems do arise, the licensing bodies are swift to act to protect the public.

Serious, unforeseen side-effects caused by medicines are now much rarer than they were a few decades ago. We have the medicine-licensing authorities of the world to thank for this. To go back to the days when medicines and other treatments could be put on the market without a licence would be asking for trouble and would cost many lives.

It is wise to be very suspicious of the claims made about any new treatment, even if the claims are made by the most eminent of experts. Some of the worst examples of quackery during the last century were perpetrated by Nobel laureates.

Remarkable claims are being made about new, experimental treatments for a condition I suffer from. I will certainly not be trying any of them until they have been given a licence by the relevant authorities.

BARRIE PAIGE,

La Haute Maison,

Verte Rue,

Vale, GY6 8BP.