Home | Callistherapy Foundation | Charitable Status
The Callistherapy Foundation is NOT a registered charity. Why is this?
We used a model Charity Commission constitution as the basis of our own constitution and proceeded to apply to register with the Charity Commission in the year 2000. We had got so far in answering their questions, and they had raised no objections to our constitution or the form of our organisation, when they required us to provide ‘evidence’ (such as the say-so of a couple of medical practitioners) that all of the therapies we were using were effective for all of the conditions they were being used for. An impossible task!
Collecting evidence of effectiveness is one of our objectives, but we couldn’t provide the results before we’d started! Besides, trying out new techniques before you know if they work is an essential part of research and development.
So we wrote to them to withdraw our application and inform them that we would proceed without their help in the company of all those pioneers whose ideas were rejected by the conservatism and vested interests of their day.
Of course, paying clients don’t come back if your treatment is not working for them and they don’t tell their friends to come. A business goes down if it doesn’t provide what people are looking for. So the main evidence for the general effectiveness of what we do is provided by the fact that we are still going after nine years and our business is steadily growing as we pass the test of time.
Second attempt
After we had set up our projects and spent some time collecting feedback to evaluate their effectiveness, we thought we might now be in a position to apply to register the projects themselves as a charity. But we found that the Commission had moved the goalposts!
It was no longer possible to pass their effectiveness test on the say-so of the people who had used the service and of local doctors, not unless we were using a specific range of therapies that medical scientists considered they understood and recognised as a fairly harmless way to make people feel good while the medical profession were getting on with the serious business of dealing with their illness.
Otherwise they would want the results of years of investment of millions of pounds in the kind of double-blind controlled trials that drug companies spend their vast profits on. They would not even accept the effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicine in spite of the fact that millions of people have been using it for thousands of years!
This is all because they have decided to base their decisions on the type of therapy used, as described in the House of Lords report on complementary therapies in the year 2000. One of the contributors to that report, the independent academic Cochrane commission, commented on the bias of the medical scientists giving evidence.
The fact is that some 70% or more of the orthodox medical treatments that the NHS spends its money on has no such evidence to support it. Even the proportion that is based on published evidence is subject to cogent criticism of the completeness and objectivity of that evidence.
So we have carried on regardless, knowing that personal experience of the benefits of our therapies is sufficient evidence for those who want to make a difference to their lives.
