'Stop NHS Funding of Homeopathy" urges Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee

[Snorbs]

The Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee, a cross-party group of MPs, has been taking expert evidence concerning homeopathy over the last year and has come to the conclusion that homeopathy is no more than placebo. "There has been enough testing of homeopathy and plenty of evidence showing that it is not efficacious." Also that "Homeopaths treat the kinds of illnesses that clear up on their own (self-limiting) or are susceptible to placebo responses". Its report concludes:

"The Government should stop allowing the funding of homeopathy on the NHS.

We conclude that placebos should not be routinely prescribed on the NHS. The
funding of homeopathic hospitals ? hospitals that specialise in the administration of placebos - should not continue, and NHS doctors should not refer patients to
homeopaths."

Full details and the report itself available in PDF format here.

The Government has not yet confirmed how it will respond to this report.

Renaldo - so what are your thoughts on GPs prescribing placebos? Do you think it ought to be done?

I've never understood how the water is supposed to 'remember' the 'active' ingredient that (isn't) in it any more, but 'forget' all the other substances that have been in the water at some other time.

Oh, I see, it isn't something you can explain...

I think you have to beat it until it remembers AvengingGerbil. This works with husbands and children also.

Great news and long overdue. By all means let people pay through the nose for this sort of quackery, but no way should any NHS money be funding it.

No-one really knows how the drug that controls my seizures works - should they stop funding that, too? It's a fair comparison, because in both cases we know it 'works' - some patients who take homeopathic treatments get better, just as some patient who take the same drug as me get better (others don't, sadly).

And no-one really understands why/how drugs work in some people and not in others.

Calling something a placebo is no reason to stop using it. Placebos work - in every drug trial that uses a placebo arm, the patients on placebo get better too (although oddly enough the trials funded by drug companies generally show the new molecule works better). Ten years after a drug has been licensed, if you add up all the trials, on average that drug will only be marginally better than placebo - does that mean the NHS should not fund any new drugs at all, but wait until they come off-licence?

There was one interesting trial where the people randomised to sham acupuncture actually did better than the people who had real acupuncture (the people who had no intervention did worst of all).

It is a very small building, snorbs. It only looks big because it has the memory of the Albert Hall in it.

hahaha at seeker

my god, how many people has homeopathy killed? how many people has conventional medicine killed? spend the energy and the money sorting that out first

i reckon put half the homeopathic patients in a regular hospital and at least some would get on the list of drug reactions, prescription addictions, mrsa, surgical error, blah blah

how many people has homeopathy killed?

I don't know, but chances are someone has died because they've relied on it instead of getting some real treatment.

It is worrying
Surely when you beat it it suddenly remembers it was once piss

[[http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/nov/07/health.lifeandhealth do you think it's as many as this?]

Surely someone in the NHS should be researching the cheapest way to do a placebo that works as well as homeopathy.

first link wot didn't work

also very

"But Professor David Cousins, a senior pharmacist at the NPSA, said only around 10% of incidents were actually reported. This suggests there was as many as 860,000 errors or near misses involving medicines across the NHS in 2007."

that's the National Patient Safety Agency

away but I should think those hospitals are saving the nhs a large compensation bill

"According to this article in the FT, the NHS is spending £4m a year on homeopathic placebos treatments."

1m less than they paid to Leslie Ash.

and lookee here

total cost 809m

Homeopathy is probably quite harmless, but I don't think we should be funding sugar pills - I know placebos can sometimes work but it seems morally wrong to be lying to vulnerable people.

bolleaux

Probono, two wrongs don't make a right. The shortcomings of conventional medicine aren't the issue here.

Badgardener, we don't need to spend millions of pounds developing a sugar pill that works as well as homeopathy, just use homeopathy! It's already there and it seems to work quite well for some people.

I really don't understand why there's such a big campaign to get rid of complementary therapies from the NHS. If Ben Goldacre doesn't like herbal medicine or homeopathy, fine, no-one will make him use arnica next time he has a bruise. But why are his lot so determined not to let anyone else have herbs or homeopathy? The NHS spend on complementary therapies is neither here nor there really. Something else is rattling their cages.

As for the ethics of placebo, I don't think it's any different to any other drug. When someone prescribes me medicine X, I don't think they usually do a whole routine about 'now, I'm going to try you on X, we think it works well in Y % of caucasian women with bp of 180 over 90 if taken at midnight after two (but not three) biscuits* and I don't know if it will help you but we might as well give it a whirl.'

(*I'm not exaggerating that much here, the anti-epileptic I take is VERY sensitive and interacts with anything else within a five mile radius.)

One of the problems, with homeopathy (aside from them being only sugar pills) is that there is NO EVIDENCE that they work better than non-homeopathic sugar pills. The people that get better on the treatments may well have got better anyway.
As lovely as it would be to prescribe patients' placebos, and I have no doubt that for a certain minority they would be helpful; it is profoundly unethical to lie to a patient about a treatment, and the placebo would only work if the patient believed that it would.

Its not complementary therapies most people have a gripe with though just homeopathy

I do have a big gripe with complementary therapies such as reiki, cupping, ear candling, crystal therapy, acupuncture etc. That gripe is that they're all just as bogus as homeopathy. No proper scientific test has shown any of them to be any better than placebo and some of them are actively dangerous.

The big difference between those and homeopathy, though, is that (as far as I am aware) the NHS doesn't fund them.

edam - the difference between the drugs you take and homeopathy is that your drugs actually have active ingredients!