Update April 2006.
From the minutes of the aromatherapy regulation committees meetings in 2006, it is interesting to note that the various interests continue chasing their tails round in circles over an utterly useless endeavour. Everything is still on track to try and register around 30,000 people practising some form of aromatherapy in the UK. Registration will do absolutely nothing to protect the public from badly trained therapists. The whole enterprise is aimed at keeping politicians and their moronic Civil servants happy, as well as keeping some people with bad track records of dishonesty well entrenched and funded at the head of trade organisations.

At the beginning of April 2006, a media investigation of the UK nurses registration organisation showed that they only checked a handful of nurses to see if they complied with the rules, yet they register hundreds of thousands! So much for registration protecting the public - HOGWASH. Registration has never protected the public when it is administered by trade run organisations and that includes doctors, lawyers and even our politicians. Don't be fooled by morons in the media and politics who demand these crazy money wasting concepts, we have mountains of laws to protect the public and prosecute offenders, but enforcement has always been almost none existent.

As an example of the incompetence of these standard setting organisations, the NOC standards 'March 2005' still include benzoin on their list of oils to be taught. There is no such thing as oil of benzoin and it is a sensitising agent. So these groups are supposed to be protecting the public from badly trained therapists are they? Perhaps the people setting the standards need to upgrade their knowledge from sources other than trade novels!

Sept. 2004.
The joke of trade committees advising on how to set standards continues. I decided to leave the committee working on statutory regulation alone for a while to see how their efforts worked out. However, now, some of their leading members represent businesses who deliberately flouted medicines control regulations for years. One company over a period of years were the subject of at least 3 separate complaints to the Medicines Control Agency. While everyone else was complying with the regulations, they carried on publishing illegal medicinal claims on their websites. Not only were the medicinal claims illegal, they were classic aromatherapy nonsense proving they had not undertaken any significant research before extracting fees from their students.

Another member of that committee is responsible for huge blunders in information provision mentioned in an old article misinformation. The same person published illegal medicinal claims in her literature as well as simply outrageous medicinal claims in respect of serious disease processes, also reported to the MCA.

Others in this committee are responsible for a string of trade misdeeds some of which are mentioned in other old articles of mine.

These same people are now advisers on how to regulate the trade - wow now isn't that a clever piece of self-marketing!!!! What a terrible indictment of the lousy moral standards in the aromatherapy business world.

The facts are that most of these trade committees are used as a mechanism for unscrupulous con artists to gain influential positions. They then use their membership as a lever to make students (particularly overseas) think they are highly regarded in the trade. Regretfully, the few honest people serving on them seem unwilling to put in place procedures enabling them to kick the trades rogues out.

After a couple of years or more working towards statutory regulation, a Government spokesperson has said they have no plans for statutory regulation of aromatherapy. So thousands of Pounds of the funds of various organisations has been spent chasing phantoms. At long last it looks as if many of the Civil Servants responsible for promoting educational committee fiascos are due for redundancy.

See this link for more on the joke "standards" committee: http://www.aromatherapy-regulation.org.uk

Original article.

The latest buzzwords being used to confuse therapists and fool the public.

This regulation mechanism is simply something to keep politicians and civil servants happy. The Civil Servants and Ministers involved in putting this together have not the first clue about how the respective trades operate.

The system is supposed to help prevent the public being exposed to rogue practitioners, but in reality the whole concept is a vast waste of efforts and funds. Only one thing has ever restricted rogues in any profession and that is the normal laws of the land. These are already there, but enforcement authorities are lax in the extreme in enforcing them. The medical profession themselves have historically been appallingly lax in dealing with their own fruadsters. The legal Ombudsman has even said that she needs more powers as the UK legal profession are not policing themselves properly.

Self policing rarely works in any trade. That is the fundamental mistake made by all recent Governments. The UK is more riddled with fraudulent businesses and individuals than any time in our history. All Government departments have completely failed to tackle this major and fast growing problem.

The UK Osteopaths scheme (who are now in theory statutorily regulated) has fallen apart at the seams. No one has been prosecuted for calling themselves an Osteopath but not being registered by the respective body.

The heart of the problem is that Civil Servants just assume such organisations are respectable and represent the majority of people in the respective trades and they do not. Most aromatherapy training is still based around the books of the popular trade novelists. This fairytale training is endorsed by the UK Department of Education via the numerous Further Education Colleges and even some University courses!

There is no way I would wish to be registered by any UK aromatherapy or Herbal organisation. I know that there are other practitioners who will likewise refuse to register with the plethora of money wasting and incompetent UK complementary therapies organisations.

Statutory regulation would do nothing to improve education. You would simply get an existing appallingly bad aromatherapy education structure given a rubber stamp.

Such regulation would not prevent a member of the public in the UK consulting someone not within the regulatory framework. To do that the Government would have to remove the common law right we have in this country to consult whoever we like about our health.

Statutory regulation does not address the fundamental problems of how to improve standards of education and practice. Neither does it protect the public from ill-trained therapists. Instead there will be lots of time wasting meetings with funds coming out of aromatherapy organisations budgets, i.e. out of your pocket, or from charitable funding organisations who would do far better investing their money in proper research.

So ask yourself:

Are the high costs involved in pushing for statutory regulation justified?

What as a therapist will you gain?

What do the public gain? 

In my view not a lot, it is just another way of certain organisations and individuals trying to get one up on the rest. These people really do not care that most aromatherapists are lucky to make a livable wage, yet they continue to squander your membership fees on unproductive projects for their own self-esteem.

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