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The French Medical Association has called for stricter regulations to avoid “confusion” between fitness professionals and medical professionals of choice, after online medical dating platform Doctolib pushed for the removal of lists of 17 naturopaths.
The Doctolib platform has the preferred way for French people to make appointments with regulated fitness professionals, such as doctors, midwives and dentists, but also with holders of state-recognized degrees, such as psychologists and osteopaths.
About 3% of the doctors referred to in Doctolib practice medications of choice such as sophrology, hyperapia and naturopathy. They work legally but are regulated.
Launched in 2013, Doctolib gained credibility in the Covid crisis by incorporating a key tool into the rollout of the vaccination campaign.
But following the allegation that the platform promoted practices that can amount to quackery and can be dangerous, the College of Physicians, a regulatory framework whose role is medical ethics, challenged Doctolib.
On a Tuesday, he said Doctolib deserves to “strengthen its moral standards for registering on its platform. “
“Doctolib allows confusion to occur between fitness professionals and other people who are not part of the medical profession,” he said.
Doctolib estimates that appointments with those professionals make up 0. 3% of the total number taken on its platform.
Criticism has focused on Irene Grosjean and her followers. Grosjean, a 92-year-old naturopath, calls the coronavirus “asshole, oh virus” because he believes it “was invented through idiots. “
Among his “natural” remedies, he recommends that you decrease the fever of newborns by rubbing their sexual organs with ice water.
“At first [the bathroom] will resist,” he said in an interview broadcast via L’Extracteur on Twitter.
L’Extracteur, a collective fighting what it sees as medical pseudoscience, said Grosjean’s recommendations amounted to child sexual abuse. He also said that he continued to offer courses that conveyed his methods.
In a series of tweets, Tristan Mendès-France, a senior professor of virtual media and a member of Conspiracy Watch, calls Grosjean a “public health hazard. “
He also found that Doctolib indexed a practitioner of urinotherapy, which involves drinking one’s own urine to be fit or as a treatment.
The CEO of Doctolib, Stanislas Niox-Chateau, first defended his group’s position of incorporating selected medical professionals into its platform.
“The call is there, it’s not up to us to say whether those activities are effective or useful,” he told Le Parisien on Monday.
“They are legal, so we have no explanation to prevent practitioners from registering on our site. “
Doctolib noted that it reports when a practitioner practices an unregulated profession.
But following revelations via L’Extracteur on Twitter that 17 practitioners indexed on the app had been trained through Grosjean and advocated self-healing methods, the organization suspended those accounts.
Doctolib also promised to adopt “in-depth consultations” with the Medical Order, industry unions and fitness authorities, civil society and Miviludes, a state-funded framework that monitors cults in France.
The Order of Physicians also called for discussions between Doctolib, the fitness government and professional associations “to better delineate the framework in which fitness professionals can be referenced on the platform. “
For his part, the president of the union of older doctors (CSMF), Franck Devulder, called on the State “to explain the practices of certain professionals that would possibly amount to quackery” and said that the Minister of Health “will regulate access to the choice of medicines and prohibit all advertising. “
The good fortune of the online medical portal Doctolib highlights the failure of the French state to go digital
According to Mendès France, Doctolib’s participation in the covid vaccination crusade has given it “an institutional appearance” and it has more obligations than the same service provider as always.
“Naturopaths and others are not a challenge as such,” he said. “The challenge is the threat of drift; that some use the site to give credibility to the public. By opening up its space, Doctolib threatens to give opportunities to charlatans. “