A third of NHS trusts still fund homeopathy despite repeated calls for them to stop, an investigation has found.
GP magazine obtained data from two thirds of primary care trusts, showing 31% were paying for patients to use the highly-diluted remedies.
It comes after doctors and the House of Commons’ Health Committee called for NHS funding of homeopathy to end.
However, the government has said it is up to local trusts to decide.
Read more at BBC Health.
Patients are at risk of being misled over the benefits of homeopathy by the government’s decision to fund the remedies on the NHS, the country’s most senior scientist warned today.
Sir John Beddington, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said patients might believe homeopathic treatments could protect them against serious illnesses, or treat existing conditions, because GPs and hospitals are allowed to prescribe them on the NHS.
Tens of thousands of people are given homeopathic pills and other preparations by their GPs or at Britain’s four homeopathic hospitals, at an estimated cost to the NHS of between £4m and £10m a year. Most homeopathic remedies are diluted multiple times to the point that only water is left, while others are essentially sugar pills.
Professor Beddington said ministers agreed to fund homeopathy on the grounds of “public choice”, despite there being “no real evidence” that the remedies work.
“I have made it completely clear that there is no scientific basis for homeopathy beyond the placebo effect and that there are serious concerns about its efficacy,” Professor Beddington told the Commons science and technology committee.
He went on to warn that government funding for homeopathy risked legitimising unproven treatments and that patients could harm their health by choosing these over conventional vaccines and medicines.
Read more at The Guardian.
Always one to keep my ear to the ground for things to get angry about, I was interested to hear on DNUK that chiropractors (or more specifically, the British Chiropractic Association) intended to ask for prescribing rights to be extended to their members. When I Googled this, I came up with this piece by Edzard Ernst in Pulse. Interestingly, the links he provides in that blog seem to be broken, but it is clearly the case that not all chiropractors are in favour of role extension (although see below).
Of course, the BCA haven’t been covering themselves in glory recently, with the Simon Singh libel case going against them. You’d think they would retire to lick their wounds and possibly have a little think about using their members’ subscription money more wisely in the future, but instead, they go on the offensive, and seek to boost the profile of the practitioners of this particular dark art.
It actually got more interesting as I looked into it. Although I had been happy to ridicule chiropractors, and berate the BCA for its short-sighted hounding of Simon Singh, I hadn’t realised that the profession (and I use the term loosely) was riven by dissent within its ranks. There has apparently been a split for some time between the fundamentalists and the modernizers. The fundies believe in the founding principles of chiropractic, namely that pretty much all human disease is due to imaginary ‘subluxations’ in the spine which disrupt the flow of energy, or some such nonsense (I hope I’m not giving the impression that I am less than open-minded about the validity of this theory). It was this belief which underpinned the adverts proclaiming the efficacy of chiropractic in treating conditions such as childhood colic and enuresis, and which led in turn to Singh’s contentious article. The modernizers apparently have just enough insight to realise why people are laughing at them, and have begun to restrict themselves to spinal manipulations for back pain.
Of course, the bad news is that the chiropractors who oppose the granting of prescription rights are the fundamentalists, who want to retain the purity of their art. It’s the modernizers, who seem to do pretty much what physiotherapists do, but without the training, who are looking to medicalize themselves by dishing out a few pills. They presumably wouldn’t be intending to do any proper training in pharmacology, but I guess they’d get the hang of it after a few initial mistakes.
I wonder if they appreciate the irony of their position: haughty practitioners of a ‘natural’ therapy, which eschews dangerous drugs in favour of adjusting the flow of energy around the body, seeking to make themselves more like the recklessly prescribing doctors. But tree-huggers tend not to get irony - they probably think Frasier is a documentary about a radio psychiatrist.
Isn’t it odd how everyone wants to be a doctor these days? Everyone except doctors, that is.
Homeopaths are offering ‘alternative vaccinations’ which doctors say could leave patients vulnerable to potentially fatal diseases, a BBC investigation has found.
Three practitioners admitted giving patients a homeopathic medicine designed to replace the MMR vaccine.
Inverness-based Katie Jarvis said she only offered ‘Homeopathic Prophylaxis’ to patients who expressed an interest.
She said: “The alternative that I would offer would be a homeopathic remedy made from diseased tissue, that comes from someone with that disease, and then made into potentised form so that is given in a homeopathic remedy.”
Read more at BBC Health.
So, the government are going to carry on funding homeopathy on the NHS? I wonder which of the coalition partners thought of that? Was it a Tory grandee with shares in a private purveyor of fairy dust to the worried well, or was it a Lib Dem, concerned that there hadn’t been anything like enough woolly-minded tree hugging holistic nonsense peddled by the Dave ‘n’ Nick rainbow alliance since the election?
Either way, it’s crap, isn’t it? I mean, if it’s OK to spend public money on bottled water for the fibromyalgic masses, why not radionics, or traditional Chinese medicine? In fact, I’d rather see it spent on Chinese herbal remedies. It may be bad news for endangered species everywhere, but at least there’d be a few active ingredients in the bottles. Plus, some of it’s pretty toxic, and I don’t imagine many GPs would regret the poisoning of the occasional heartsink patient.
Still, I suppose I shouldn’t get too sniffy about the homeopaths. One of the good things about being a radiologist is that, if you choose the appropriate sub-specialty (and I can recommend nuclear medicine) and then train the radiographers and imaging technicians to do all the stuff like injections, you hardly ever have to come into direct contact with patients. I’ve always thought that they were the biggest obstacle to the enjoyment of medical practice, so it’s nice to be able to keep them at arm’s length.
GPs and homeopaths have to spend hours every day talking to them - must be dreadful. I suppose it’s even worse for the homeopaths, because at least some of the GPs’ patients actually have something wrong with them (there again - so do some of the homeopaths’ patients, it’s just that the ‘holistic’ practitioners haven’t been trained to notice that sort of thing). Actually, I think I may just have talked myself out of my antipathy to homeopathy* on the NHS. If 70% of GP patients just need someone to talk to, it might as well be a homeopath. Better than wasting a doctor’s time.
Well, that was nice. We’ve been on a journey here, readers, and that’s a good thing, because these days, everything seems to be a journey, doesn’t it? There’s the Patient Journey, of course, without repeated mention of which no nursing document is complete, and most ‘celebrities’ seem to be ‘on a journey’, usually to or from The Priory. And you have all just been privileged to witness my journey from doubter to believer concerning homeopathy. A good day’s work all round.
*When I corrected the first draft of this blog, I found I had typed ‘hopeopathy’ instead of ‘homeopathy’ at this point. A term I think I might use more deliberately in future.
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.
The NHS should stop funding homeopathy and it should no longer be marketed as a medicine in pharmacies, doctors say.
Medics voted on the issue at the BMA’s annual conference in Brighton.
They dismissed the highly-diluted remedies as “nonsense” and potentially harmful to patients as it can lead them to shunning conventional medicines.
The Department of Health homeopathy said treatment was under review.
The NHS is thought to spend about £4m a year on the treatment, helping to fund four dedicated homeopathic hospitals and numerous prescriptions.
Read more at BBC Health.
The Prince of Wales’ controversial charity dedicated to promoting the use of complementary therapies has decided to close down permanently, after being embroiled in a fraud investigation.
The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health issued a statement saying the body had decided to close because it had ‘achieved its key objective’ of promoting the use of complementary therapies.
But it admitted the closure had been brought forward by a probe into the alleged misuse of funds by a former aide to the charity.
The Prince’s Foundation has been rarely out of the news in recent years, with a very public spat with Professor Edzard Ernst over a complaint made by the charity, the foundation’s involvement in a much-criticised self-regulatory body for complementary therapy, the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, and a proposal to develop ‘kitemarks’ for GP practices providing complementary therapies.
Read more at Pulse.
Homeopathy should not be funded by the NHS, say MPs.
The Science and Technology Committee analysed scientific literature on homeopathic treatment and found no evidence of efficacy.
Homeopathic products should no longer be licensed by the MHRA because they are not medicines, the committee advised.
The NHS spends £4 million on homeopathy annually, according to the Society of Homeopaths.
In the report the select committee criticised the government for a ‘mismatch’ between evidence of efficacy and policy.
“It sets an unfortunate precedent for the DoH to consider that the existence of a community which believes that homeopathy works is ‘evidence’ enough to continue spending public money on it,” said chairman of the committee Phil Willis and Liberal Democrat MP.
Explanations for why homeopathy would work are ‘scientifically implausible’ and there is no evidence of how it works beyond the placebo effect, they concluded.
Read more at Healthcare Republic.
Homeopathic medicines are licensed for use in the UK without any requirement for scientific evidence to show they are any more effective than a placebo, the government has admitted.
Instead the onus is on manufacturers to demonstrate that homeopathic medicines are safe and of a suitable quality, the Department of Health said in a submission to a House of Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry into the use of homeopathy in the NHS.
“This is a quite astonishing admission for a government that claims to base policies on the best scientific advice,” said David Colquhoun professor of pharmacology, University College London.
In his response, he described homeopathy as a “bad joke” which could endanger the lives of patients. He cited examples where homeopaths had tried to treat conditions like malaria and AIDS.
In Australia two homeopaths were charged with manslaughter and sentenced to six and four years in prison, when their own daughter died for lack of proper treatment.
“It is only a matter of time before the same thing happens here. If and when it does, the Department of Health will bear some of the blame because of its shameful disregard for evidence,” he said.
He called for homeopathy to be referred to NICE as any other proposed treatment would be. “To allow sugar pills to be paid for by the NHS is an absurdity”, he said.
John McLachlan, professor of medical education and associate dean of medicine at the University of Durham, said: “Despite the MHRA claiming that they “ensure medicines work”, they licence homoeopathic products for which there is no evidence of efficacy, and indeed, evidence that they do not work.
He added: “Accepting homoeopathic beliefs about the consequences of dilution also requires acceptance that the basic rules of physics and chemistry are held in abeyance”.
Vincent Marks, professor of biochemistry at Surrey University said licensing homeopathic remedies gave them a credibility they did not deserve. “Evidence based medical practice should not have to compete for funds with what can legitimately be described as a cult practice based upon nothing more than unsubstantiated dogma”.
There are concerns that the introduction of personal budgets could see an increase in patients requesting alternative medicine treatments.
But, the European Central Council of Homeopaths said: “When emerging evidence from recent studies into the provision of homeopathy in the NHS is taken into account, the benefit to patients who’ve had homeopathic treatment would seem to be substantial and worthy of more consideration than it has received up until now.”
Read the inquiry submissions.
