Keith Swanick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As a health professional, I am concerned about a disturbing and unregulated trend that has emerged in the health care sector of late. I refer to so-called health specialists with no formal medical or nursing training who rent rooms in hotels around the country. They provide cardiovascular health assessments to vulnerable patients using simple probes that can be bought on eBay yet they compare their activities with the gold standard of angiography. It is worrying because these conmen mislead patients and often give them a false sense of security. The assessments are completely inappropriate. It takes six years to qualify as a doctor and at least five years of postgraduate training to have the skills to take an adequate history from a patient, perform an examination, instigate investigations, make a diagnosis and make a prognosis that predicts how a disease will progress. The Medical Practitioners Act 2007 governs what medical practitioners do, and rightly so. Who governs medical fraudsters? The sale of insurance and financial products is highly regulated but the sale of misleading information is not. These conmen take large sums of cash from rural communities on a weekly basis and I would like to see their tax returns for same. I ask the Leader to invite the Minister for Health to discuss this important but worrying matter that has raised its head in the past few months.