Homeopathic remedies may soon be banned in the UK

Health officials in the UK are considering blacklisting homeopathic remedies, a move which would prohibit doctors there from prescribing alternative medicines found to be ineffective in several large-scale studies, BBC News and The Guardian reported on Friday.
The controversial practice, which is based on the principle that “like cures like” (i.e. substances that cause symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure the same symptoms is somebody who is ill), but critics claim that the approach is a pseudoscience built around placebos.
For instance, diluting pollen or grass could, in theory at least, be used to create a homeopathic remedy for hay fever. One part of the substance is mixed with 99 parts water or alcohol, and the process repeated six times in a “6c” formula or 30 times in a “30c” one, said BBC News. Similar methods are used to “treat” asthma, ear infections, arthritis, allergies and depression.
However, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) said that there is “no good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition,” and now, lawmakers are reportedly considering banning general practitioners from prescribing such treatments.
Effectiveness of the treatments debated by experts
On Friday, health department officials announced that a consultation on the issue would occur sometime in 2016, and The Guardian noted that the move comes following threats of a judicial review. During the announcement, life sciences minister George Freeman said that due to rising medical costs, the government had an obligation to ensure NHS funds were spent wisely.
Science writer Simon Singh, founder of the Good Thinking Society, a group which threatened to pursue a judicial challenge the agency’s refusal to prohibit doctors from prescribing homeopathic remedies, welcomed the news. Singh said that his group had been pressuring officials to conduct such a review for more than a year, citing that they did not meet the proper criteria for use.
Those criteria, he explained, are whether or not a treatment is effective, whether or not it is cost-effective, whether or not there were cheaper alternatives, and whether or not it was so available that it did not need to be prescribed. “By any of those criteria,” Singh said, “homeopathy should be blacklisted. This is money that could be spent on drugs that do work. It’s not about being anti-homeopathy, it’s about being pro-patient and spending money on drugs that do work.”
However, Dr. Helen Beaumont, president of the Faculty of Homeopathy called it “disappointing” that health officials were “embarking on a costly consultation” that could prevent doctors from “prescribing a course of treatment that benefits thousands of patients each year.” She went on to tell the BBC, “homeopathy works, it’s widely used by doctors in Europe, and patients who are treated by homeopathy are really convinced of its benefits, as am I.”
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