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I think that the last estimate was approx £4m per year from a budget of over £100bn. Just for context, more than £1.7bn is being spent on the implementation of the NHS Health and Social Care Act 2006
The reason they don't have side effects is that they have no effect.
I find it incredible that otherwise intelligent people believe in this stuff.
I don't single out homoeopathy. Anything that's not been proven to work shouldn't be funded.
The wonderful thing about the scientific method and peer review is that I don't have to know how the body works. I can assess the studies that are performed by people who do.
The problem with this is it fosters a mentality where there's a disregard for evidence and critical thinking. This is relatively innocuous when treating the vague unease of the middle classes, but it bleeds out and you'll find yourself advocating treating cancer with broccoli because someone thinks it'll work FOR THEM.
I've nicknamed this type of argument the Kansas Shitty Shuffle: there's a turd on your carpet and someone is trying to apply misdirection by pointing to a bigger turd on another carpet. You still have a turd inbetween you and the telly.
So i say fuck off, this worked for me. the turd went quickly and easily this way, and with less stains left on the carpet than with your method.
You don't see any harm then?
Didn't work very well for these people.
http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html
The danger with homeopathic remedies is that people believe they work. The more people that believe it the more people will ignore medicine that actually works.
yes and yes.
it's in the same box as the christian woman I knew who advised a fellow student in the CU to come off her anti-depressants and rely on prayer and God...
Some of those are very extreme, and a lot of them arent even about homeopathy.
You could just as easily find patients who died of cancer or AIDS whilst using conventional medicine.
I do know a woman who is very against conventional medicine and i was completely freaked out when she refused to vaccinate her children against whooping cough and then they all caught it including her very small baby who was very ill. I pretty much begged her to use conventional medicine. She used homeopathy instead. Its not a risk I or many others would take, and its not something MY homeopath would ever have encouraged. The children including the baby are now fine. I still think shes a dangerous nutcase about it.
The fault here is not homeopathy. Its nutters. Its like blaming the christian church for the existence of westboro baptist.
What I dont like, is people taking big risks with childrens health though, and this is where the law usually does come in, as in the case of the little boy recently in the news. Was it Neon something??
Its not the fault of alternative medicine itself, and what you are arguing against here is pretty much individual autonomy and informed consent.
Medicines that have been clinically proven to work. It's no comparable, unless you throw reason and common sense out the window.
You know the reason why homeopathic remedies have no side effects? Because it's water - it has no effect.
This is unfortunately the sort of problem you are going to get as long as people maintain homeopathic remedies work.
The fault lies in the people that peddle this stuff and those that believe it works. If you want to call them nutters go ahead.
So do I as long as they are well informed. If people believe that homeopathic remedies work I suggest they are not well informed, in fact they are misinformed.
Homeopathic remedies for curing cancer, hepatitis, malaria, typhoid, diabetes. Jesus wept.
http://www.blueturtlegroup.com/
http://www.cancertutor.com/
1. Does homeopathy work
2.
A) should people have the choice to use it regardless of efficacy
Scientific consensus supports the efficacy of hypnosis especially in conjunction with other treatments.
Just giving context. Pissing away £4m is less of an issue than £1bn on reorganisation, and that isn't party political cos they are all as bad as each other. We also spend more than this on "real" medication that people don't bother to take, only to then get worse and need even more expensive treatment. We spend much more than this on so many otehr areas which actually don't achieve any real benefits...
Just context.
I completely support people's right to choose, I just don't think that the NHS should fun it. We should be funding evidence based care and that simply doesn't exist for homeopathy.
Not sure of actual case mentioned but the state (in this case usually NHS) does step in regularly, whether it's religious grounds or not too. There's a small part of me that thinks we should when it comes to herd immunity issues like MMR, without that immunity we end up with measle epidemics and that's a killer.
Fucking magic water.
Why would I try something that has been clinically shown to have no effect?
Actually, yes it does. Because of the "proven" part.
Vaccine damage does happen.
But i don't agree you need to try homeopathy to be confident it doesn't work. I don't need to sail around the world to prove to myself it isn't flat. Smarter and more able men and women do this for us, then publish their results, and then smarter men and women still endorse or criticise those results to reach a consensus.
Though the consensus can be wrong as science is always publishing new and better results, but that's different from saying a scientific consensus and a gut feeling have equivalence, or that distrusting modern medicine is no different from people who distrust homeopathy.
A homeopath trotting out pseudoscience and claiming that research backs her up when every report she quoted stated that the methodology of the clinical trials was so low that any positive proof was questionable and that the higher quality trials found little effect?
Yup.