Vaccinating Children: The COVID-19 Family Law Jurisprudence.

Australian, New Zealand, English and Canadian courts have made a number of orders, often in the context of parenting disputes, requiring children to be vaccinated. Complementary therapy options have generally not been permitted as an alternative to mainstream vaccination. Debates about parental entitlements to make decisions about such matters have taken place in the context of contested family law litigation during the COVID-19 era. However, by contrast with Ontario Superior Court of Justice decisions in 2022, a series of Australian decisions, including the judgment of Sutherland CJ in Clay & Dallas [2022] FCWA 18, have developed the law further, having regard to both the capacity of a minor to consent to vaccination and reviewing a variety of factors going to children's best interests at different junctures during the pandemic, finding it generally to be in the best interests of children to receive COVID-19 vaccinations. This is likely to flow back into curial decision-making about vaccinations more broadly, as well as cognate matters.

The Complementary Medicine Insurance Wars: The Unresolved but Politicised Australian Theatre of Combat.

Debates have taken place for many years internationally, including in Australia, about the therapeutic effectiveness and safety of complementary/alternative medicine (CAM). The issues raised in such disputation go beyond the capacity for patients to make choices informed by contemporary knowledge about the status of such disciplines and the accuracy of claims made by the various stakeholders. As government subsidises rebates under private health insurance for a number of modalities of health care, the entitlements of CAM disciplines to such rebates have become controversial. This editorial traces Australian reports since 2010 about the eligibility for insurance rebates of a number of CAM disciplines and calls for the current 2019-2020 review by the Chief Medical Officer to engage in a fair, rigorous and conclusive evaluative process, utilising as its yardstick contemporary evidence about treatment efficacy. Such a process has the potential to bring to an end disputation that has only served to confuse patient decision-making, cater to vested interests and incur for government costs that cannot properly be justified.

Guidance on Prescription of Homeopathic Treatments: Ramifications of a Failed Administrative Law Challenge.

In R (on the application of British Homeopathic Association) v National Health Service Commissioning Board [2018] EWHC 1359 (Admin) Supperstone J of the High Court of England and Wales delivered an internationally significant judgment on the processes required to be engaged in when guidance is given to medical practitioners about their involvement in homeopathic prescribing. This column explores the bases upon which the challenge by the British Homeopathic Association was lost and the repercussions of the judgment for the practice of non-evidence-based modalities, such as homeopathy.

Vaccination Litigation: The Need for Rethinking Compensation for Victims of Vaccination Injury.

Opposition to vaccination has a lengthy history dating back to shortly after the discoveries by Jenner in relation to smallpox. In recent years though governments have sought to counter the concerns of anti-vaccinationists in a variety of ways, including legislatively in Australia, in an effort to protect against childhood diseases and to maintain herd immunity. However, cases continue to make their way through the courts where parents oppose the vaccination of their children, often inspired by the views of both registered and unregistered health practitioners, including homeopaths and chiropractors. This article catalogues recent decisions by the courts in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada, most of which are in favour of vaccination and have dismissed the arguments of those opposed to vaccination as unscientific. It argues that Australia should give serious consideration to emulating the model existing in multiple countries, including the United States, and should create a no-fault vaccination injury compensation scheme.

THE MEDICO-SCIENTIFIC MARGINALISATION OF HOMEOPATHY: INTERNATIONAL LEGAL AND REGULATORY DEVELOPMENTS.

The 2010 report of the United Kingdom Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons and the 2015 report of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council have overtaken in significance the uncritical Swiss report of 2012 and have gone a long way to changing the environment of tolerance toward proselytising claims of efficacy in respect of homeopathy. The inquiry being undertaken in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration during 2015 may accelerate this trend. An outcome of the reports and inquiries has been a series of decisions from advertising regulators and by courts rejecting medically unjustifiable claims in respect of the efficacy of homeopathy. Class actions have also been initiated in North America against manufacturers of homeopathic products. The changing legal and regulatory environment is generating an increasingly scientifically marginalised existence for homeopathy. That new environment is starting to provide effective inhibition of assertions on behalf of homeopathy and other health modalities whose claims to therapeutic efficacy cannot be justified by reference to the principles of evidence-based health care. This has the potential to reduce the financial support that is provided by insurers and governments toward homeopathy and to result in serious liability exposure for practitioners, manufacturers and those who purvey homeopathic products, potentially including pharmacists. In addition, it may give a fillip to a form of regulation of homeopaths if law reform to regulate unregistered health practitioners gathers momentum, as is taking place in Australia.

Death by homeopathy: issues for civil, criminal and coronial law and for health service policy.

Homoeopathy has a significant clinical history, tracing its roots back to Hippocrates and more latterly to Dr Christian (Samuel) Hahnemann (1755-1843), a Saxon physician. In the last 30 years it has ridden a wave of resurgent interest and practice associated with disillusionment with orthodox medicine and the emergence of complementary therapies. However, recent years have seen a series of meta-analyses that have suggested that the therapeutic claims of homeopathy lack scientific justification. A 2010 report of the Science and Technology Committee of the United Kingdom House of Commons recommended that it cease to be a beneficiary of NHS funding because of its lack of scientific credibility. In Australia the National Health and Medical Research Council is expected to publish a statement on the ethics of health practitioners' use of homoeopathy in 2013. In India, England, New South Wales and Western Australia civil, criminal and coronial decisions have reached deeply troubling conclusions about homoeopaths and the risk that they pose for counter-therapeutic outcomes, including the causing of deaths. The legal decisions, in conjunction with the recent analyses of homoeopathy's claims, are such as to raise confronting health care and legal issues relating to matters as diverse as consumer protection and criminal liability. They suggest that the profession is not suitable for formal registration and regulation lest such a status lend to it a legitimacy that it does not warrant.

Huntington's disease and the law.

Huntington's disease (HD) is a relentlessly progressive and fatal neurological condition that is inherited. It has serious and disabling physical and mental components. As such, it impacts upon those who have HD, those with the potential to inherit it, and those who care for those with HD in a wide variety of ways. These can have many legal ramifications including in relation to evolving impairments of capacity which can have an outcome in terms of involuntary status as mental health patients, testamentary capacity and the need for guardianship and administration. It can have effects upon fitness for parenting, obligations for spousal maintenance, and the quantum of compensation from a tortious incident to which a person is entitled. It has repercussions for criminal liability and culpability. This article reviews case law from a number of countries in relation to such matters, noting the broader radiation to others of the effects of HD, and reflecting on the need for legal and medical professionals to be aware of the legal consequences of HD for them to be able to discharge their responsibilities holistically, sensitively and informedly.

Regulation of vitamin and mineral supplements: lessons from the Truehope saga.

A series of court and regulatory hearings has characterised the distribution and promotion in Canada of Empower Plus, a vitamin and mineral supplement promoted by its distributors as efficacious for a remarkable array of psychiatric conditions, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The column chronicles the saga and the multiple ethical and scientific concerns that arise from it. It argues that, given the risks posed to the vulnerable by supplements constituted by micronutrients that may uninformedly be seen as a viable alternative to orthodox pharmacotherapies, none of which are panaceas, supplements should be subjected to rigorous medico-scientific assessment and regulation. It laments the too rare institution of consumer protection actions brought in an effort to protect the public in such scenarios.