Homeopathy will continue to be available on the NHS, the government has said in response to a House of Commons science and technology committee report.
That report recommended that homeopathy should no longer be available on the NHS because of the lack of evidence of its efficacy.
Despite the NHS needing to make significant savings, the government responded that it was up to local clinicians to decide whether homeopathic treatments were appropriate.
The government says: “We believe in patients being able to make informed choices about their treatments, and in a clinician being able to prescribe the treatment they feel most appropriate in particular circumstances, within the regulatory and guidance frameworks by which they are bound.”
It adds: “Our continued position on the use of homeopathy within the NHS is that the local NHS and clinicians, rather than Whitehall, are best placed to make decisions on what treatment is appropriate for their patients - including complementary or alternative treatments such as homeopathy - and provide accordingly for those treatments.”
There was strong support for stopping the NHS funding and commissioning of homeopathic remedies from doctors attending the recent Annual Representatives Meeting of the BMA.
Dr Mary McCarthy proposed a motion which said scarce NHS resources should not be spent on treatments that “have no firm evidence base”.
She said: “Let’s leave homeopathy to be funded by those who want to use it and who believe in it, and leave NHS scarce resources for proven medical treatments.”
A separate strand of the motion, which called for pharmacists to place homeopathic remedies on shelves labelled ‘placebos’, was also carried.
The government response does call for the scientific evidence for homeopathy, or lack of it, to be explained and available to patients.
It says: “[The Chief scientific adviser] has concerns about how this policy is communicated to the public. There naturally will be an assumption that if the NHS is offering homeopathic treatments then they will be efficacious, whereas the overriding reason for NHS provision is that homeopathy is available to provide patient choice.”
Read the government’s full response.
Tags: Alternative medicine
When I qualified in the mid1970s new house officers soon learnt how useful it was to prescribe a placebo -nux vomica was a favourite (bitter and unpleasant) and when I spent a period in general practice the large red bottle of Metatone filled the same therapeutic window.Some purist then decided that prescribing placebos was unethical.Homeopathic remedies meet this need although I have never indulged in this whimsy.