The Irish Medicines Board (IMB), is coming under growing pressure to bow to public will. It wants herbal medicines to be prescription only, and the first such herbal remedy - St John's wort, used to help people with mild to moderate depression - will not be available over the counter in the health shops from January 1st.
I return to this subject, dealt with in some detail in last Wednesday's Irish Times, because of the response to an interview with Dr Ronan Gleeson of Cork in a recent column. He is a conventional doctor but is a herbalist as well and has given some consideration to the matter. He will say nothing more than that patients of his who have not responded well to traditional medicines have done much better when treated with herbal ones.
He is not an evangelist in this regard. There are those in his clinics, he says, who must be treated with the pills, potions and antibiotics that make up modern medicine, but there are others who do better with the natural remedies. They came to know about them only because their local doctor had an interest in the subject.
But other people who take an equal interest have read the literature and guided themselves into the subject. That's why health shops have been flourishing.
The question is: should Big Brother make the choices or should the free will of the health shop-users prevail? When all is said and done, no one forces you to go to the doctor for that pill, capsule or injection, and neither is anyone beating you in off the street to a health shop to buy the herbal remedy you feel is suitable.
From now on, the IMB is telling you where you must go. If you are a fan of St John's wort, forget the stroll into your local health shop - you will have to acquire it on prescription. The irony is that people like Dr Gleeson might have given it to you anyway if that's what he felt was the best course of action. Now, though, people who were perfectly happy with the herbs they were using will have to approach a doctor's surgery, perhaps queue, and certainly pay an attendance fee, before they can buy the product of their choice.
What struck me about the whole business was that I had more than 30 telephone calls from all over Ireland on my answering service in the week after the column to discuss the subject. There were no exceptions. Each caller condemned the decision of the IMB to impose its new regime.
If this was a sample, representative poll, the IMB might well be required to sit up and take notice. Having listened for more than an hour to the callers, I was convinced this was not orchestrated and that these were the voices of ordinary people who were distressed on hearing news of the IMB's decision.
Many of them made an impression, including two lay people whose names were freely given. They had taken recourse to herbal remedies because conventional medicines hadn't worked for them. A woman caller from Mayo said she had almost given up hope when she stumbled across natural cures. A man from Dublin said he was convinced that natural remedies had given him a new lease of life.
And just in case this is beginning to appear as something of an advertisement, let me repeat that the IMB is of the opinion that it has perfectly good reasons for demanding that the first of the herbs to come under its control - St John's wort - should be put on the prescription list. Categorically, it has said the herb may cause distressing symptoms such as gastro-intestinal problems, fatigue and nervousness.
I HAVE said before that if the Chinese got by for almost 5,000 years on herbal cures, something had to be right, but the IMB says there is evidence to prove that some of the chemical properties in these natural remedies should be administered only under medical supervision.
It says too that at the annual meeting of the British Association of Dermatologists some weeks ago a report outlined how seven of the 10 creams prescribed for patients by Chinese herbalists contained high doses of steroids and had damaging effects. The authors of the report presented to the conference believed greater restrictions should be introduced to monitor and regulate Chinese herbal preparations. This one will run and run.