First, the Telegraph blew the whistle on Members of Parliament wasting taxpayer's money on duck islands. Now MPs are blowing the whistle on the National Health Service wasting taxpayer's money on quacks:
The NHS should stop funding homeopathy, MPs say.The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said using public money on the highly-diluted remedies could not be justified.
The cross-party group said there was no evidence beyond a placebo effect, when a patient gets better because of their belief that the treatment works...
It is thought about £4m a year is spent on homeopathy by the NHS, helping to fund four homeopathic hospitals in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow and numerous prescriptions.
Reports the BBC. Robert Wilson, of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers is apparently 'disappointed'. Since every pound of public money squandered on this discredited nonsense is a pound not available for proper, effective treatments, his disappointment gives me immense pleasure and some hope for the future.
2 comments:
a whole 4 million pounds out of an annual budget of some 100 billion?
about as significant as the 1 million MPs were ordered to repay, now to be replaced by a much more expensive policing system.
perhaps the Telegraph, and your blog, ought to be focusing on problems that have a somewhat bigger impact on the UK.
Your sense of proportion is spot on, Emma - £4 million's a small, almost homeopathic, amount compared with the total NHS budget, a defence budget out of all proportion with our staus as a medium-sized world power, an education budget often squandered on endless cock-eyed initiatives seemingly designed to make he core task of teaching kids impossible, not to mention the telephone number sums spent on bailing out the banks.
Should I focus more on these bigger issues? If I was running a quality opinion-forming newspaper, I'd take a serious look at my news priorities right now. But I'm just one bloke with a blog, reacting to various things I come across, from the serious to the utterly trivial and focussing on the things that happen to catch my attention for purely idiosyncratic reaons. I try to get my facts right, but I make no claim to always address the most important issue of the day.
We're agreed that the funding of homeopathic hospitals isn't the most important thing happening in the UK, by any stretch of the imagination. Is it worth mentioning at all, then?
I'd argue that, although the amounts involved are peanuts, there is the nugget of something worth thinking about in this story. Namely, what constitutes good enough evidence to base a policy on.
From what I know about homeopathy, I believe there's no compelling evidence that it works. We already fund such treatments out of the public purse, seemingly on the basis of anecdote, the perception that some voters might be keen on the idea and the spin of people with something to gain from the outcome.
As you've pointed out, saving £4 million on this stuff isn't going to affect the state of the nation, but what if the same sort of flaky attitudes to truth and evidence go unchallenged when we're asking bigger questions? WMD in Iraq, the perception of having abolished the economic cycle of boom and bust (in a ten year period when wages increased by about 30%, house prices more than doubled and levels of personal debt soared to keep up), giving childeren the MMR vaccine or not...
Sugar pill salesmen, dodgy dossiers, economic wishful thinking, ill-founded health scares over life-saving vaccinations - the seriousness of the problems may vary, but the principle of using good evidence as a basis for decision making and sifting truth from spin doesn't.
In my opinion.
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