Alternative Medicine

Bloody right too:

A GROUP of Britain’s leading doctors has urged every NHS trust to stop paying for alternative medicine and to use the money for conventional treatments.

Their appeal is a direct challenge to the Prince of Wales’s outspoken campaign to widen access to complementary therapies.

Public funding of “unproven or disproved treatments” such as homoeopathy and reflexology, which are promoted by the Prince, is unacceptable while huge NHS deficits are forcing trusts to sack nurses and limit access to life-saving drugs, the doctors say.

The 13 scientists, who include some of the most eminent names in British medicine, have written to the chief executives of all 476 acute and primary care trusts to demand that only evidence-based therapies are provided free to patients.

Their letter, seen by The Times, has been sent as the Prince today steps up his crusade for increased provision of alternative treatments with a controversial speech to the World Health Organisation assembly in Geneva.

The Prince, who was yesterday given a lesson in crystal therapy while touring a complementary health unit in Merthyr Tydfil, will ask the WHO to embrace alternative therapies in the fight against serious disease. His views have outraged clinicians and researchers, who claim that many of the therapies that he advocates have been shown to be ineffective in trials or have never been properly tested.

If as and when double blind trials are done to show that "alternative" treatments work, they then stop being alternative and become conventional, evidence based medicine. Which is as it should be. If rich idiots (or even poor idiots) wish to waste their money on healing crystals, let them do so. The rest of us can then have our tax money spent on crystals that actually work: like the lutetium oxide ones that are at the heart of an MRI scanner. (Of course, this is just me talking up my own book again. Guess who has in the past (and would like to again in the future) supplied that lutetium oxide?)

The full letter is here:

First, there is now overt promotion of homeopathy in parts of the NHS (including the NHS Direct website). It is an implausible treatment for which over a dozen systematic reviews have failed to produce convincing evidence of effectiveness. Despite this, a recently-published patient guide, promoting use of homeopathy without making the lack of proven efficacy clear to patients, is being made available through government funding. Further suggestions about benefits of homeopathy in the treatment of asthma have been made in the ‘Smallwood Report’ and in another publication by the Department of Health designed to give primary care groups “a basic source of reference on complementary and alternative therapies.” A Cochrane review of all relevant studies, however, failed to confirm any benefits for asthma treatment.

You what? Homeopaths are actually killing people by giving them sugar pills for an asthma attack? Hang the buggers for murder!

The list of signatories is pretty impressive:

Professor Michael Baum
Emeritus Professor of Surgery, University College London

and
Professor Frances Ashcroft FRS
University Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford
Professor Sir Colin Berry
Emeritus Professor of Pathology, Queen Mary, London
Professor Gustav Born FRS
Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology, Kings College London
Professor Sir James Black FRS
Kings College London
Professor David Colquhoun FRS
University College London
Professor Peter Dawson
Clinical Director of Imaging, University College London
Professor Edzard Ernst
Peninsula Medical School, Exeter
Professor John Garrow
Emeritus Professor of Human Nutrition, London
Professor Sir Keith Peters FRS
President, The Academy of Medical Sciences
Mr Leslie Rose
Consultant Clinical Scientist
Professor Raymond Tallis
Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester
Professor Lewis Wolpert CBE FRS
University College London

Just as an aside, I doubt there’ll be many memberships of the Royal Victorian Order offered to these guys.