This is an area that needs to be watched. The Watch Tower Corporation at the agent level gives this type of medical advice.
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Trial starts on charge of illegal medicine
BY KEVIN DOBBS Argus Leader published: 3/25/02
Case stems from woman's death
The South Dakota Attorney General's office says Colleen Harvey of Mitchell is guilty of deceptive trade practice and practicing medicine without a license - actions that hastened the death of a Brookings woman with breast cancer.
The defendant, however, dismisses the claims, insisting that she is an established natural-health adviser who provides clients with information on diet, nutrition and other homeopathic remedies - and nothing more.
As the case against Harvey gets under way today at the Davison County Courthouse in Mitchell, the medical and natural health industries will be watching closely because the first-of-its kind complaint in South Dakota could clarify what an unlicensed health practitioner can do when advising a client, long a gray area in health and law.
The case, to be presided over by Circuit Judge Lee Anderson, could also decide the future of Harvey's 10-year-old business and open the door for a civil lawsuit from the deceased Brookings woman's family. But this is not a criminal case decided by a jury; rather it's a hearing after which the judge will determine Harvey's professional merit and perhaps whether she must cease operation of her business, one that she estimates brought in some 600 clients in the past decade.
Judge Anderson is scheduled to begin hearing opening statements at 9 a.m. today and attorneys involved in the case expect his ruling to come by Friday. The complaint was originally filed against Harvey last May 31.
Harvey left comment on the specifics of the case to her attorneys, but she said she maintains her innocence and continues to run her alternative health business in Mitchell. "We just want to get to court and get this resolved," Harvey said.
The state began investigating Harvey after the death of Dorothy Dietrich of Brookings in June 2000. Harvey, the state alleges, illegally treated Dietrich for breast cancer.
As a natural-health adviser, Harvey has said she worked with Dietrich at different points between 1995 and 2000, but that she only provided Dietrich information on diet, nutrition and healthy living. Harvey said she told Dietrich to see a medical doctor for treatment of cancer.
But the attorney general says that at some point in her consultations with Dietrich, Harvey convinced Dietrich that cancer was curable with alternative means such as nutritional supplements. It is illegal for anyone but a medical doctor to diagnose and treat diseases such as cancer.
Court documents and interviews with Dietrich's family members show that her illness was diagnosed as breast cancer in the winter of 1999 and that physicians advised her that a mastectomy was a viable option to treat it. But Dietrich opted instead for noninvasive treatment. She traveled as far as Mexico for alternative therapies, but the process quickly grew too expensive. Dietrich then turned to Harvey in hopes that she could help in some way.
But Dietrich's cancer spread into her brain, and on June 24, 2000, the 62-year-old woman died in a Brookings hospital.
She left behind the question of whether Harvey merely advised her on diet and lifestyle choices to prop up her immune system and bolster Dietrich's health in general, as Harvey has said, or whether she ventured into the realm of medicine and illegally attempted to treat cancer, as the state claims.
Court documents show that Paul Dietrich, the surviving husband of Dorothy Dietrich, told the state that Harvey had treated his wife for cancer on several occasions between March 1999 and March 2000.
The state also claimed that a tape recording of a session between Dorothy Dietrich and Harvey proves Harvey had told Dietrich that with other patients supplements, detoxification and other non-medical means have helped treat disease - indicating that Harvey was advising her clients about cancer treatment.
Paul Bachand, assistant attorney general, is in charge of the state's complaint.
Harvey's defense, meanwhile, will insist that she never offered to treat Dietrich's cancer and that in a decade as a natural health adviser, she never held herself out as a medical doctor.
Her lead attorney, Ann Richtman of Superior, Wis., said several of Harvey's clients will testify to her credibility. She also said that the recording the state maintains incriminates Harvey is misinterpreted.
"The implication that the state has made is that as a result of seeing Colleen (Harvey), Dorothy (Dietrich) died," Richtman said. "But Dorothy always refused conventional treatments, and so it seems to me that what happened with Dorothy and her cancer had to do with Dorothy's decisions, and nothing to do with Colleen."
Regulation
The Food and Drug Administration and other federal and state agencies can regulate the alternative health industry.
But those agencies have staffing limitations that make it impossible to closely monitor every alternative health operation. Agencies usually intervene only when a person is hurt.
Example: The FDA completed about 160 inspections out of 1,000 manufacturers of nutritional supplements in 1999 and 2000. It handed out penalties only 39 times, owing in part to vague rules governing the industry.
The law says that sellers of alternative health products can't claim to treat specific ailments or cure diseases. They may claim, however, that a nutritional supplement can promote better blood flow or stronger bones or a bolstered immune system - things that could ward off or help fight disease.
In the end, attorneys said, the Harvey case could shed new light on the fuzzy parameters of alternative health.
Reach reporter Kevin Dobbs at [email protected] or 605-977-3924.
http://www.argusleader.com/news/Mondayarticle3.shtml
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