Homeopathy: bad medicine
Simon Stevens didn’t sugar the pill, said Nick McDermott in The Sun. The head of the NHS this week launched an outspoken attack on the homeopathy industry, slamming practitioners as “chancers” who push “bogus” treatments onto the British public. He also blamed homeopaths for spreading “misinformation about vaccines” – a subject of great concern, when the level of vaccination among pre-school children has been in sharp decline. The NHS stopped funding homeopathic remedies in 2017, but the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care (PSA) still lists homeopaths on its official register. Stevens has written to the watchdog to demand that it strip the Society of Homeopaths of accreditation. Failing to do so, he argues, risks giving a “veneer of credibility” to those who seek to “con more people into parting with their hard-earned cash” in return for “miracle cures”.
The PSA should “heed Stevens’s advice”, said The Times. There’s not a “molecule of evidence” that homeopathy – an alternative medicine working on the principle that natural substances in tiny amounts can cure ailments – actually works. In many cases, it may be harmless, but when used as a replacement for medical attention, it can be dangerous, making “sick people sicker”, or even causing “fatal delays in proper treatment”. It also overlaps with “more dangerous” beliefs. About 60 members of the Society of Homeopaths are practitioners of Cease therapy, which “claims wrongly that vaccines cause autism, and that homeopathy can cure it”. There are shades here of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) scare of the 1990s, when the vaccine was linked to autism, causing a sharp drop in inoculations and a rise in deaths from the diseases.
You can sense Stevens’s exasperation, said Harry de Quetteville in The Daily Telegraph. “Why won’t these people accept the facts and go away?” But the truth is, “people don’t, they never have and they never will”. As psychologists remind us, debates over “things like homeopathy, vaccines, or – God forbid – Brexit” are rarely rational. They are certainly not won by telling opponents that they are stupid, or being “conned”. When trying to persuade others, it’s far better to win them round with powerful emotional stories than to shout and bombard them with data. Ironically, by ignoring that fact, it’s the scientific, rational people – like Stevens – who are really deluding themselves. Until those who campaign against homeopathy and quack medicine work that out, they will continue to bang their heads “uselessly against the wall”.