Turning the tide against the prosecution of innovative medicine

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Dec, 2004  

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How many more doctors and alternative practitioners will be dragged before their medical boards and disciplined before we take action and form a coalition to end this persecution of advanced medicine forever? Every year a new study comes out, the number of people availing themselves of alternative medicine grows and grows. Still the medical boards insist that alternative therapies are dangerous to the public and outside the accepted "standard of care." It is time to turn the tide and insure the freedom of access to innovative therapies! One doctor, Robban Sica, MD, has gone on the offensive to establish a national precedent to protect practitioners whose only "crime" is using an innovative therapy to help patients get well.

In 1987, the chiropractic profession filed an antitrust suit, Wilk et al. v. the AMA, and won a federal court decision against the AMA. As a result of this suit, chiropractic has become the most accepted of all the alternative therapies out there, and the AMA has ever since been wary of putting its foot back into the waters of attacking alternative therapies as quackery. However, several organizations including the Federation of State Medical Boards, a private corporation that acts as a clearing house for the theory and practice of states investigating licensed medical doctors, came on the scene shortly after the 1987 decision. With the encouragement of the FSMB and other quack-buster organizations, the prosecution of holistic doctors and practitioners and alternative therapies has continued.

As has happened in many states, the Connecticut Department of Public Health (DOPH) is targeting integrative medical doctors in an attempt to restrict access to natural healing therapies. Over recent years in Connecticut, a number of doctors and dentists have been investigated and/or charged or had their licenses revoked simply because they practice using innovative/alternative treatments. The most recent is Dr. Robban Sica who was charged in September 2003 with "violating the applicable standard of care" because she allegedly treated coronary artery disease with EDTA chelation therapy, while the DOPH contends that EDTA chelation can only be used for lead toxicity. Without regulating, codifying or publishing any guidelines for the undisclosed "standard of care," the Connecticut State health officials are seeking to restrict or revoke Dr. Sica's license. In order to end this assault, Dr. Robban Sica has brought a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Department of Public Health and Connecticut State health officials. This suit is unprecedented in its very approach: this doctor is suing the Department of Public Health and the medical board in federal court for numerous violations of her constitutionally protected due process rights. For instance, the DOPH has never written any such laws or regulations regarding chelation with EDTA, or for that matter, any topic relating to the chelation of heavy metals. In short, in Connecticut, there is no written, codified or otherwise regulated standard of care regarding this treatment, yet they have charged her with misconduct without first giving "fair warning" of what the misconduct is. How can you be in violation of a law or of a "standard of care" that does not exist? You can't just make up a law after the fact, after you've charged someone with violating that law!

Dr. Sica commented, "When I got that letter from the DOPH, followed later by the statement of charges, I knew I had a choice. One was to give up my rights to use a valuable treatment and the other was to fight. If I had played ball and accepted their settlement, it would have severely limited my treatment of metal toxicity; eliminated any use whatsoever of EDTA; I'd be on probation for five years, paying over $2,000 a month for the privilege of supervision, and possibly have my license revoked (as has happened to other physicians)--and I had done nothing wrong! So, on the one hand, I could just do what was needed to stay in practice, but on the other hand, I thought, what right do they have to deny patients proper treatment? Or any reasonable care they need and want.

"My practice is rather unique in that over half of my patients are suffering from chronic fatigue and/or fibromyalgia. I myself had suffered from chronic fatigue years ago and was almost totally disabled. Then I found out that my illness was caused by lead, cadmium and mercury toxicity, and it was EDTA chelation therapy that saved my life. I would have been totally disabled today had it not been for EDTA chelation. So I feel pretty passionate, as a patient, that these therapies need to be available. That's why I choose to fight."

Because this case is in federal court and it involves constitutional rights and the way the statutes are being used or ignored, it will have major implications, like Wilk et al. v. the AMA, for all physicians as well as all alternative practitioners subject to scrutiny by the medical boards, simply because they are innovators. We cannot stress how important this case is to protecting the rights of physicians and patients alike to the healthcare of their choice.