The med­ical fra­ter­ni­ty is un­der at­tack by med­ical fraud­sters.So says Dr Neil Singh, head of the Health Ser­vices Unit at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine.He was speak­ing at the launch of the third an­nu­al Health and Well­ness Ex­po, or­gan­ised by U The Caribbean Health Di­gest, at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain.Singh said fraud­sters ex­ploit the gap in health and well­ness which ex­ists in our health­care sys­tem, which deals pri­mar­i­ly with treat­ing phys­i­cal ill­ness­es.

In an in­ter­view yes­ter­day, Singh said these fraud­sters in­clud­ed self-pro­claimed heal­ers, cer­tain weight-loss spe­cial­ists and traders of coun­ter­feit drugs."There are many pseu­do-health­care pro­fes­sion­als who claim to do many things. There are fraud­u­lent med­i­cines be­ing sold in our mar­ket and fraud­u­lent prac­ti­tion­ers who claim they can cure can­cers and di­a­betes," Singh said.He said in oth­er coun­tries peo­ple un­der­go five years of train­ing be­fore prac­tis­ing com­ple­men­tary and al­ter­na­tive med­i­cine (CAM).How­ev­er, in Trinidad there are many prac­tion­eers of CAM who have on­ly com­plet­ed a three-month crash course abroad. CAM, ac­cord­ing to Web­MD, is an area of med­i­cine re­lat­ed to herbal treat­ments, mas­sage ther­a­pies and mag­net­ic ther­a­pies.Be­sides im­ple­ment­ing prop­er reg­u­la­tions, Singh said, the threat can be re­duced by pro­mot­ing health­i­er lifestyles.

He ad­vised that cit­i­zens should be vig­i­lant about the drugs and con­sult a doc­tor be­fore tak­ing any al­ter­na­tive treat­ments. Health Min­is­ter Fuad Khan said he was con­cerned with these in­di­vid­u­als who claim they can cure can­cer and oth­er dis­eases."The min­istry is con­cerned with those treat­ing (mem­bers of) the pop­u­la­tion with cer­vi­cal or breast can­cer and mak­ing false ad­ver­tise­ments. We in­di­cat­ed to the DPP (Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions) to take ac­tion," he said.Khan said he was chang­ing the "laws" to work on the is­sue.