The South African Department of Health (DoH) published regulations related to complementary medicines in 2013, and these regulations have left Leon Louw, executive director of the Free Market Foundation, somewhat displeased. In the opening paragraph, he tells us:
In the name of science, they might promote rather than curb scams and pseudoscience. Instead of protecting consumers, they erode access to products and information. They subject supposedly unscientific Cams to supposedly scientific allopathic standards. Notwithstanding the regulations and the pretentious explanatory memorandum, the difference between the two is smaller than protagonists of science assume.
Those “supposedly”‘s – along with scare-quotes around words like “unscientific” and “scientific proof” at other points in the column – seem to signal that Louw thinks the DoH has fallen prey to some sort of biased “scientism”, whereby they expect that CAMs should satisfy criteria that (according to Louw) even allopathic medicine cannot.