The Professional Standards Authority has re-accredited the Society of Homeopaths - CEASE therapy for autism

Reaccreditation document (PDF)

This one is a little surprising. A number of us have been expressing concern to the Professional Standards Authority (PSA) about the response by the Society of Homeopaths (SoH) to those of their members who are offering "CEASE" therapy for autism.

The SoH keeps a register of its 997 members (at Sep 2018, all of whom are allowed to use the term RSHom in their marketing material) and the PSA accredits a variety of society registers, including SoH's. SoH therefore runs an Accredited Register (AR) of homeopaths, though accreditation isn't meant to imply that homeopathy works.

Last year the PSA re-accredited the SoH with some provisos that the society would need to satisfy some additional monitoring requirements about those of their members offering CEASE.

Yestesrday the PSA published the latest accreditation and I've not read it all yet but wanted to add something here about it as I've written several times on this topic.

The 21 page PDF from the PSA is here - Society of Homeopaths Annual Review 2018

What surprised me is that the PSA highlighted a problem with members of an AR offering any treatment (whether real or bogus) that claims to treat a protected characteristic such as autism. The SoH still has members offering this, with a range of claims.

Thanks to @UKHomeopathyReg for alerting me.

Also of interest and relevance is that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has referred five homeopaths (I don't know if any of them are SoH members, no reasons to assume that any are) to Trading Standards for further investigation. Last year the ASA sent an Enforcement Notice to 150 UK homeopaths who were making misleading claims to treat or cure autism. Homeopaths should not write CEASE out in full (it stands for Complete Elimination of Autistic Spectrum Expression) as the full name is an implied health claim, which is misleading.

Why so-called CEASE Therapy claims to 'cure' autism really have to stop - Guy Parker, CEO ASA