The NHS should stop funding homoeopathy and it should no longer be marketed as a medicine in pharmacies on the ground that it is little more than ‘pernicious nonsense’, according to doctors at the annual conference of the BMA in Brighton.
BMA doctors committee vice-chair Tom Dolphin, who first proposed banning homoeopathy at the BMA annual junior doctors conference in May, said: “I got into trouble for saying at the juniors conference that homoeopathy is witchcraft.”
Criticism
Piling on criticism against homoeopathy, Dolphin said: “I take that back and apologise to the witches I apparently offended by association. Homoeopathy isn’t witchcraft — it is nonsense on stilts.
It is pernicious nonsense that feeds into a rising wave of irrationality that threatens the hard won gains of the enlightenment, and the scientific method.”
The BMA conference voted overwhelmingly in favour of stopping the commissioning or funding for homoeopathic remedies or homoeopathic hospitals in the health service. UK training posts in homoeopathic hospitals should also be scrapped, the conference said.
Dolphin warned that society risked “sinking back into a state of magical thinking, where made-up science passes for rational discourse, and wishing for something to be true counts as proof.” Shropshire-based doctor Mary McCarthy said: “We are not asking for homoeopathy to be stopped and it will allow those who want to do it to continue to use it. What we are asking is that it’s not funded by the scarce NHS resources.”
Only psychological boost
She said there was no evidence from hundreds of trials that homoeopathy worked beyond the placebo effect, in which a patient gets better but only because they believe the treatment will work and their symptoms clear up because of the psychological boost. She added: “It can do harm by diverting patients from conventional medical treatments.”
The BMA call to ban homoeopathy in NHS comes after the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee called for a similar ban in February, saying that it couldn’t be justified.
The Society of Homoeopaths, however, insisted there was evidence that homoeopathic remedies worked. The Department of Health said it was looking into the issue.