UK Homeopathy Funding Cut

The Homeopathy ban I talked about has just made the news again. It's not very accurate to call it a ban, so I'll just refer to it as a funding cut. The British Medical Association has voted to stop providing homeopathic treatments on the National Health Service. The BMA has also said that all homeopathic products should be labelled as 'placebo' when sold in pharmacies. The post on the funding cut from the Telegraph has an excellent way of describing how homeopathy works.

Without wanting to go into it in too much detail here, it is based on:
• a) a mistaken idea that substances that cause a symptom can cure that symptom (e.g. poison ivy causes skin rash so it can cure eczema, or onion causes running eyes so it can cure hay fever) and
• b) that the more dilute a remedy is, the more potent it is – without limit. So – with not a trace of irony – homeopaths offer “remedies” diluted so far that you could reasonably expect to find one molecule in a sphere of water several times larger than the Sun. I am not exaggerating, incidentally.

They also mention an incident in Australia last year where a couple were jailed after they treated their 9 month old daughter's eczema with homeopathic remedies rather than taking her to a doctor. Needless to say, placebo's do not work at all for some conditions and most certainly do not work on 9 month old children who aren't aware they're being treated for anything. Their daughter died of septicaemia as a result of the non-treatment of her condition.

Anyway, here is the link to the post on the Telegraph.

Doctors vote to drop homeopathy on the NHS – and about time