In recent years, the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and the Fight against Sectarian Aberrations (Miviludes) has acted as the last bastion against abuses related to unconventional care. When patients had had the misfortune to contact naturopaths, energy specialists or other indelicate bonesetters, their reports generally landed on the desk of his advisers. What was therefore the (unpleasant) surprise of the members of its orientation council to learn, during a meeting on June 13, that the Ministry of Health intended to launch a support committee for the evaluation of these practices without the services of the Mission.
“The head of Miviludes indicated that his administration did not yet have official information on this new working group,” reports a participant. Outcry around the table, and embarrassment of the representative of the avenue de Ségur… Contacted by L’Express two days later, the office of the Minister Delegate Agnès Firmin Le Bodo pleaded a “misunderstanding”: “The sending of invitations is a matter of the internal management of the ministry, but Miviludes has been well associated with our work from the start and it will be present on the support committee.”
Fertile ground for therapeutic or sectarian abuses
Banal bickering between two administrations? Much more than that. Because through this committee, there are two visions of the regulation of these “parallel medicines” which clash. With, as a result, gigantic economic interests. Some want to “sort out these practices”, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. Which could, by the way, lead to legitimizing some of them, the distribution of which is not based on any scientific proof of their effectiveness. What cause the concern of those who observe the accelerated development of this sector, fertile ground for therapeutic or sectarian excesses.
“Either the treatments are scientifically validated, or they are not. In this case, they do not have to be ‘supervised’ by the Ministry of Health”, thunders Georges Fenech, the former president of Miviludes, today now a member of its orientation council. The former magistrate had himself contributed in 2009 to the creation of a “technical support group” within the Ministry of Health, on unconventional care. But its objectives were very different from those of the committee currently in the making: “It was a question of alerting the populations to the risks of these practices. A dozen of them had been evaluated by Inserm and the opinions given were turned out to be very negative,” recalls Georges Fenech.
“A successful lobbying operation”
The choice of other members of the future committee also fuels mistrust. In addition to the representatives of various administrations or the No FakeMed collective, the Ministry of Health also plans to invite, according to a document that L’Express was able to consult, the Agency for Complementary and Adapted Medicines (A-MCA) and the University College of Integrative and Complementary Medicine (Cumic). The A-MCA has an agency in name only: it is actually an association that has been working since 2019 to “promote suitable complementary practices”.
Its three co-founders – the psychologist Véronique Suissa, the sociologist Serge Guérin and the doctor Philippe Denormandie, father of Julien Denormandie, a very close friend of the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron – aspired to create a public agency for this purpose. A project supported by… Agnès Firmin Le Bodo, then a simple deputy. The operation had fizzled in the face of criticism. It quickly became apparent that the association had among its members homeopaths, acupuncturists and even sophrologists – a little as if representatives of pharmaceutical laboratories sat on the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products or on the High Authority for Health.
“Finding them at the Ministry of Health, we can say that it is a successful lobbying operation”, summarizes a good connoisseur of the file. As for Cumic, its honorary president, Jacques Kopferschmitt, had signed the preface to a White Paper on Anthroposophical Medicine, a practice denounced by… Miviludes in its latest report. “To my knowledge, the committee does not include any of the associations involved in the fight against sectarian aberrations, which nevertheless receive many calls related to health”, regrets Dr Pierre Brémond d’Ars, president of the No FakeMed collective, wary of the idea of playing the sidekick in a body that is not very critical of these practices. Proof of the sensitivity of the question, the cabinet of Mrs. Firmin Le Bodo prefers to keep the mystery of its official composition until its first meeting, on June 28. Surprise, surprise…