ADVICE GIVEN BY HEALTH FOOD SHOPS - IS IT CLINICALLY SAFE

Objective: To determine whether health shop staff give specific therap eutic recommendations to someone who describes symptoms associated wit h serious pathology and to determine whether they refer this person to conventional medical care. Design: Quantitative survey using particip ant observation. Setting: Health food shops selling herbal, homoeopath ic or nutritional remedies in inner London. Method: A researcher visit ed 29 health food shops and claimed to be suffering from severe, daily headaches of recent onset. The researcher recorded on tape whether th e health shop staff took diagnostic information; recommended any thera peutic intervention; asked about or recommended seeing a general pract itioner (CP); asked about use of conventional drugs. Coding of the int eractions was carried out independently by two researchers. Results: W hereas all but two shops recommended a specific therapeutic interventi on, less than one in four advised a CP consultation. Forty-two differe nt interventions were recommended. There was little consistency in the advice given.Conclusion: Health food shops need to review the circums tances in which they should venture to provide advice and the basis on which they make any therapeutic recommendations. Shops selling over-t he-counter herbal, homoeopathic and health food products are a common feature of UK high streets. Such shops could be a useful source of hea lth information and advice to their customers, but could also lead to harm, for example by delaying treatment of known benefit, if their rec ommendations were to be inaccurate or inappropriate.