I am alerted by Dr. Stephen Barrett’s Consumer Health Digest that a new UK-based group, The Nightingale Collaboration, has been launched by Simon Singh, Alan Henness, and Maria MacLachlan.  The group’s website states that “The Nightingale Collaboration will work to improve the protection of the public by ensuring claims made about complementary and alternative therapies are not misleading.”  The group will do this by:

• challenging misleading claims made by practitioners on their websites, in advertisements and in their promotional and sales materials and subjecting these to scrutiny by the appropriate regulatory bodies;
• striving to ensure that organizations representing complementary and alternative practitioners have robust codes of conduct for their members that protect the public and that these are rigorously enforced.

Sounds promising.  I’m going to be following this new initiative.  The group can be followed on Twitter @NightingaleC.