http://aspirationofthesoul.wordpress.com/

-GaleG

Privately practising homeopaths are not covered by the NHS.

By the way, I was wrong about the £10 million refit. According to the hospital’s website it was £20 million!

I am not in the UK. Are the hospitals that are NHS funded staffed with MD homeopaths? Are the non MD homeopaths also covered by your NHS?

Thanks,

Anyway, we’ve discussed the problems with personal experience being used as evidence. I’m glad that your daughter’s healthy and not suffering whatever illness it was that caused you to take her to the doctor, but it’s perfectly possible that it would have got better on it’s own.
You’re probably thinking something like ‘but she was a baby, how can she be influenced by the placebo effect?’ I think that M Simpson’s explanation of how farmers can be influenced by the placebo effect in paragraph 6 of comment 160 applies also to babies. Here it is again
“If you tell a farmer that the pill you’ve given his horse will cure it and he believes you, it’s very easy for him to think that the animal seems a little friskier, a little less lethargic – even when there’s no actual difference. (And this can then affect how he treats the animal – warm and positive instead of despairing and negative, leading to its gradual recovery.)”

I’m sure that you know better than almost anyone how, with babies, if you’re chilled out, then the baby’s happier too. I think that this is ‘cos you’re arms are more relaxed when you’re cuddling him/her and you’re a teensy bit gentler when wiping their mouth after they’ve possetted (although there are almost certainly other explanations with equal or greater (or lesser) validity). The babies can feel this (they’re sensing your vibes, if you will) and will respond in kind, leading to a vicious or virtuous cycle. If you’re worried because your little bundle of joy and poo is poorly, then you’ll be stressed, she’ll sense this and will cry more. If you give her something you know can’t hurt them and you believe will treatthem, then you’ll feel better and calmer and she’ll pick up on this and cry less and everything will get back to normal.
There’s no problem with this if you’ve seen real doctors and they don’t think there’s anything wrong* with your baby. The problem arises when people go to homeopaths instead of real doctors. They can fail to pick up signs of serious diseases or can simply leave untreated otherwise trivial diseases and this can lead to serious harm for a baby. The http://www.whatstheharm.net/homeopathy that somebody posted earlier gives examples of precisely this happening and babies dying as a result.

In the UK we’ve a specific problem with people going to homeopaths, and that’s the NHS. It’s free for all to use, but it has to be paid for somehow. The payment is from general taxation and therefore it’s got a tight budget for what it does and there’s always pressure from right-wingers to see it reduced so that they can pay less tax. There are 5 hoemopathic hospitals which cost us millions of pounds a year (the one in London recently had a £10 million refit – that’s $20 million!), but there are also some real hospitals which can’t afford to prescribe the latest breast cancer drugs, leading to some women dying or having their breasts cut off unnecessarily. Those of us opposed to homeopathy would at the very least like to see it removed from the NHS, and all the money diverted back into real medicine, which is what has prompted the Leckridge letter you posted.

Sorry for 2 v. long posts in a row, but I wanted to fully explain to you the specific situation here and my (and many others’) problems with homeopathy and homeopaths

*by wrong, I mean a serious disease, as opposed to the usual baby complaints which sort themselves out after a little while with some TLC.

Regarding “all of it’s effectiveness”, you’re right, it’s probably not just the placebo effect that accounts for it. As well as the placebo effect of getting and taking a tablet, there’s also the ‘having a nice chat with a sympathetic person who’s got enough time to properly listen to your concerns and feelings’ effect (it probably has a better name, maybe it’s cnsidered part of the placebo effect, but whatever it is, it’s definitely real) and the ‘overpriced plonk’ effect, whereby wine tastes better if it costs more (seriously, this is true, see here: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/01/higher_price_makes_c.html).
A properly designed study will control for all of these things and more, allowing us to see only whether the homeopathic remedy actually does anything or whether it’s all the other stuff which surrounds it (the chat, the payment, the placebo etc). This is easier than it sounds – all you need to do is just not tell the patient or the homeopath who’s getting a homeopathic remedy and who’s getting the placebo (thus it’s double-blind) and you only find out who had what at then end after you’ve finished the study and done all the analysis (you have to know what group they were in, but not which group had what). Whenever this has been done properly and in large enough groups to be meaningful, the homeopathy has turned out not to be any better than a placeboo which is accompanied by the same consultation and cost process.
That’s why people like gimpy, flim_flam, M Simpson and all the others who’ve posted here not in favour of homeopathy are currently convinced that it doesn’t work any better than placebo and that’s why we can be quite rude about people who claim that real medicine is rubbish and homeopathy is what works (or just people who claim that homeopathy works).

If homeopaths really were serious about your health and were honest in their convictions that it works, they’d have conducted such studies (that’s proper studies, not customer satisfaction surveys like the Bristol one) a long time ago. If they were to show (conclusively and thoroughly in enough people to counter all the previous failed experiments) that it works (even for one condition), and if this could be replicated in at least one other decent study, then all of us skeptics would shut right up and get on with trying to prove how it works and thus win the Nobel prize for medicine (or chemistry or physics, or all 3!).
Heck, the homeopaths could even make a lot of money out of it (James Randi has $1 million for anyone who can reliably do anything paranormal, and he includes homeopathy in that, so for a smallish initial investment a small group of homeopaths could make themselves very rich in quite a short space of time). To many of us their silence speaks volumes, as does the combined effect of all the previous studies that homeopathy showed failing to work.

I was a pediatric nurse and then a midwife for many years. Gimpy knows this, so please excuse me, but it was my second child that brought me to try homeopathy. I had taken her to many doctors and the wanted to give her drugs. I decided to try homeopathy and it helped her, and then my entire family.

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call them “toxic drugs” though. Everything’s toxic in a great enough dose, even homeopathy (swallow enough tablets at once and you’ll choke or get blood sugar metabolism problems, drink enough liquid remedies and you’ll die from a water overdose, if the cost of buying enough bottles to do that doesn’t give you a heart attack first!)

The definition of a drug is a chemical that has an effect on the body beyond its nutritional content, so homeopathy is either a type of drug or it is a placebo. Aside from not apparently knowing that, Dr Leckridge fails to understand any of the problems (which we’ve been discussing) with anecdotal evidence. He even says “two out of three patients report [homeopathy] is of benefit to them” without any reference to the placebo effect. That’s not evidence.

The fact that someone who claims to be a doctor shares them is not enough to make your delusions true.

run:http://heroesnotzombies.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/response-to-another-attack-on-homeopathy/

Dear Madam

£250,000 spent last year by the Scottish NHS for “alternative” drugs? What an outrageously small amount! In the same year the Scottish NHS drugs footed a £1 billion pound bill to the drug companies for prescribed medicines. Yet, 90% of all drugs only work in 30 – 50% of the people who take them. Deaths from homeopathic medicines in the whole of the UK in 2006? Nil. Deaths from prescribed drugs? 1013 reported (over 10,000 estimated). Cost of Adverse Drug Reactions to homeopathic medicines? Nil. And to prescribed drugs? About £500 million a year.
Let’s be clear. Human beings are not machines. What works for one person may not work for the next. Health care needs to be diverse. We need more research into non-drug, non-surgical treatment options and we need to make more available on the NHS inexpensive, safer treatments, such as homeopathy which two out of three patients report is of benefit to them. And while we are at it, Joan McAlpine, let’s stop the arrogance of dismissing the relief of human suffering as “sick fantasy”. If someone says their pain has gone, it has. Prove it hasn’t! If someone says their depression has lifted, it has. It’s time to start putting patients first. At Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital we are, like all good doctors everywhere, successful because we listen to patients and believe what they tell us. We could do with more of that on the NHS.

yours faithfully

Dr R W Leckridge