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Health bosses are spending millions on unproven homeopathic treatments despite calls for funding to be withdrawn.
Figures published today show the capital's primary care trusts have spent £4.5million over three years on homeopathy, which has been dismissed as "biologically implausible" by the medical establishment.
Meanwhile, the NHS is bracing itself for the most severe funding crisis in its history, with managers warning it will be £15billion in the red by 2011.
Homeopathy is based on the theory that a substance which can make people ill can, when diluted thousands of times, treat symptoms it would otherwise create.
Practitioners believe the weaker the dose the more effective it is, and typically dilute it until almost none of the original ingredient remains.
Supporters of homeopathy, who include the Prince of Wales, argue its users report beneficial effects.
But Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, called the remedies "biologically implausible".
David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at University College London, said: "Every study shows it doesn't work - there is nothing in these pills. Homeopathy is just a confidence trick."
Reader views (8)
It is not true that all homeopathic medicines contain no molecules of source materials. It's often the case, but not always. The high dilution stuff has no biological plausibility, the low dilution stuff could have some effect. The studies I've seen that report a half way convincing effect for homeopathy are for the low dilution stuff which coventional medicine might expect to work.
As for whether it works in the field... if it does, fine, but you have to demonstrate that systematically. Otherwise you don't really know. What does it mean to say that it works in the field? That people keep coming back for more? How does this address regression to the mean and placebo? Blood letting was shown to work in the field for a very, very long time (at least to the satisfaction of it's practitioners and their patients)... far longer than homeopathy.
- Sceptic, London, UK
If products that don't work can be licensed on the basis that some people think they work and there's no evidence of any harm, then it's difficult to see what the point of licensing really is.
Under this criteria waving your hands around whilst dancing wearing only a hamster on your head whilst shouting "Okky, okky, ooh, ooh, bing, bang, boppy, bop" should be considered "medicine" so long as you can find one person who thinks it made them feel better (and who wouldn't feel better after laughing at that spectacle?)
- Andy, Western Australia
I wish the NHS would save life's first and stop all this play surgery stuff. No more plastic surgery, IVF or witchcraft. The waste inside the NHS is obvious to any visitor. Plus stop them outsourcing everything. Bring al the services in house and sack all the mangers creating lists and spreadsheets, no in fact give them a mop and get them cleaning the wards.
- Gary, Brentwood 2
What about the waste of all those people in white, blue and green coats wandering around from one personal life chat to another?
Where do I get this info? - A nurse in a baby unit. Even they can't believe it.
- Dave Davies, Basingstoke
Looks like a lot of people have been reading Bad Science...
But I agree with the article: the NHS should not be wasting millions a year on water that has been treated with an undetectable amount of another element, given a shake and called a cure.
- Nobby Clark, Perth, the Scottish one
I tried homeopathy when I was a child to rid me of allergies to cats, dogs, dust and horses. It didn't work and I diligently took the drops for well over a year. Arnica (when applied neat) seems to work on fresh bruises though - what's that - homeopathy or just a herbal remedy?
- Isabel, Woking
Great article, it's good to see the media taking homeopathy to task, well done Sophie. In fact, you can go even further - rather than thousands of times dilute, the dilution by powers means the final liquid is actually billions of times diluted, or more even. As Joe above points out: 'It is true that potentised homeopathic medicines contain no molecules of the source materials from which they are made'.
As Joe misses, every study shows it doesn't work - that's true. Every GOOD study, anyway. There are some poorly-controlled, badly-designed studies that show an effect - crucially these often compare homeopathy to doing nothing, rather than homeopathy to a similarly-administered, double-blinded placebo. Control the parameters and the measurements, and the effect of homeopathy goes away.
It's not so hard to understand, a small child can grasp the concept - you take some orange squash, put a drop in a cup of water, mix it up, take a drop of that and put it into another cup of water, mix it, repeat for the next 5 cups, and then drink what's left. It won't taste of extra-strength orange juice, it will taste of water. Because that's all it would be by then.
- Marshall, Merseyside Skeptics Society, Liverpool, Merseyside
It is true that potentised homeopathic medicines contain no molecules of the source materials from which they are made and therefore of course they are 'biologically implausible' from a conventional doctor's or pharmacologist's understanding. However they are not simply just diluted in their preparation the potentisation process is more complex than that - and both these sceptics know it.
David Colquhoun is simply not telling the truth when he says ' every study shows it doesn't work'. There are a whole range of studies some of which appear to show it does work, some of which appear show it is no better than placebo and some which appear to show it does not work. What matters is that the patient experience out in the field shows it does work, and there are large outcome studies to support this. Just because homeopathy does not fit into the box of conventional molecular pharmacology does not mean it does not work - it means that there are other dimensions in the human being that have yet to be understood and in which therapies such as homeopathy and acupuncture are and have been working for a very long time.
- Joe Jordan, London
