Safety key to good choices

Do we believe in freedom of choice?

What about the freedom to choose unhealthy courses of action?

A recent Associated Press series raises these issues in regard to what is known as complementary and alternative medicine.

Two issues are at stake, and they should be separated as distinct. Often, they are not.

l Products and therapies that are actively dangerous or fraudulent. Into this category for instance fall supplements that, when independently tested, were found to contain arsenic or lead. Some extreme therapies may also fit this description.

These are situations in which government intervention is clearly warranted.

l Products and therapies that may not be scientifically proven to be efficacious but that, on their own, do no harm. In this area, the informed consumer should be free to make up his or her own mind whether to trust and use complementary and alternative medicine, without government interference.

But even a category meant to encompass fair, free choice is not so cut-and-dried.

The optimal operation of this ideal does require consumers to be informed — many are not.

And there are always cases in which, critics claim, use of alternative medicine does cause harm — as when a cancer patient relies unsuccessfully on non-traditional therapies when doctors urge aggressive radiation or chemotherapy or surgery. Choosing one therapy means not choosing another — and the choice may well be the wrong one.

Still, this is about the right to choose. Patients should be able to decide their course of action, even if others deem that choice to be unwise, even if that choice fails to save them.

Radiation or chemo or surgery might have failed to save the patient, too. However, years of study in traditional medicine has provided cure rates and statistical data that the informed patient also should take into consideration.

Then there are cases when the patient cannot give informed consent. Currently there is the case of an 11-year-old Minnesota boy who was left so debilitated by chemo treatments for Hodgkin’s lymphoma that he and his family opted for Native American healing. Authorities intervened and ordered the chemo.

Virginia had a similar case a few years back, although it was eventually resolved with compromise (the situations also differed in that the Virginia teen was a few years older than the Minne-sota boy and deemed old enough to have some say-so in his treatment).

Yes, these choices are difficult — for patients, for families, for government officials who want to do the right thing, and who believe they are doing the right thing when they intervene.

But government should first set its attention on ensuring that alternative medicines and therapies are not downright harmful — that supplements are not adulterated or mislabeled, and that therapies are not actively dangerous.

Consumers should be free to make own choices among alternatives that at least, according to the Hippocratic oath, “first, do no harm.” They cannot make free, fair choices from information that is deliberately misleading or dangerously incorrect.