HealthWatch UK was founded in 1991 as the Campaign Against Health Fraud. Its founders included a distinguished professor of surgery, Michael Baum, who was very concerned about the number of women who had presented to his clinic with late-stage breast cancer because they, instead of seeing their doctor as soon as they realised that they had a lump, had sought treatment from a number of 'alternative' practitioners who peddled useless treatments and made a great deal of money in the process. Since then HealthWatch UK has campaigned on several fronts to advance evidence-based medicine, to promote the best possible practice in clinical research and to oppose all forms of bogus and pseudoscientific treatments.
HealthWatch UK does not offer advice to individual patients; rather, we campaign on several fronts by pressing bodies like the Advertising Standards Authority, Trading Standards and the Charity Commission to restrict the activities of alternative and complementary practitioners. We also participate in policy development with NICE and other national bodies by getting involved in their consultations and we promote the highest possible standards in the design, registration, conduct and reporting of clinical trials - this in collaboration with Transparency International and by using a well-established network of contacts to leading clinical scientists, politicians and others. Each year we run a student prize competition for students of medicine, dentistry and allied health professions: in this the students are invited to rank a group of preselected research proposals in order of quality and to explain why they have ordered them in this way. By running the competition we aim to help educate students in the evaluation of research evidence so that they can be more discriminating in their appreciation of healthcare evidence. We publish a newsletter four times a year in which we describe what we do and highlight other developments in the areas of clinical trial evaluation, health evidence evaluation and opposition to bad practice in both the conventional and alternative health sectors.
