I imagine you will receive many submissions from people pointing out that sugar pills aren’t medicine and that lying to patients that they are is not justifiable even to invoke a degree of genuine placebo benefit. I have a somewhat different concern.
Homoeopathy is a huge, multi-billion-euro business. Outside the NHS there are both medically-qualified and non-medically-qualified people promoting the system, and they find a ready market among patients with chronic or life-limiting conditions who become frustrated that scientific medicine can’t provide a pill to cure them. Homoeopathy offers that pill, dressed up in buzz-words like holistic, integrative, natural and so on.
One of the great difficulties faced by people trying to provide evidence-based information to those tempted by this seductive and well-funded marketing is the riposte that homoeopathy is offered on the NHS, therefore it is endorsed by the NHS, therefore it has been proved to be effective. Medical professionals who offer homoeopathy in addition to EBM send out a mixed message that can be very destructive, offering patients reluctant to confront decisions that have to be taken an illusion of doing something, when sugar pills are not the something that needs to be done.
I imagine you will be familiar with the extreme case of the death in Australia of Mrs. Penelope Dingle, who refused surgical treatment for a rectal carcinoma on the advice of homoeopathic practitioners, until the disease was too advanced to be successfully treated.
The coroner’s report makes chilling reading. One of the main concerns of the inquest was that legitimisation of unproven or ineffective treatments by health professionals sent mixed messages to vulnerable and desperate people who may have fallen into the clutches of the more radical homoeopathy believers.
I have an almost identical concern from my own professional perspective as a veterinary surgeon. Homoeopathy in the context of animal medicine is a pernicious, cruel lie. While a human patient who perceives benefit from the “therapeutic consultation” is arguably receiving real benefit, fitting an animal’s owner with rose-coloured spectacles is of no benefit whatsoever to the animal. The placebo effect is astoundingly easy to invoke by proxy – simply telling an owner that the animal is better can be enough to convince them, as they are of course not feeling the pain themselves but merely interpreting the animal’s appearance and behaviour.
Homoeopathy has a disturbing toe-hold within the veterinary profession, including not just pet medicine but farm animals. The regulations for organic farming prescribe that homoeopathy should be used in preference to EBM, on the grounds that licenced medicines are unnatural chemicals. One of the major obstacles to attempts within the veterinary profession to address this issue is the perennial claim from our own homoeopathic believers that homoeopathy is an integral part of the NHS, is endorsed by it, and accepted as efficacious.
I write therefore not just as someone born and bred and residing in Lanarkshire for many years, now three miles outside the county boundary in Peeblesshire but still potentially a user of NHS Lanarkshire, but as a member of a related profession with serious concerns about homoeopathy. I hope that the damage that can result from the legitimisation of homoeopathy by the NHS is something that will be taken into account in your deliberations. Every Health Authority that withdraws support from homoeopathic services brings closer the day when the promotion of animal suffering by substituting sugar pills for effective medicine can be outlawed from the veterinary profession.
