Western medicine doesn’t know it all. There are treatments that don’t work at all well, others that work for reasons that nobody can fathom, and all sorts of others again that are still to be discovered. It is also true – as western medicine itself has firmly established – that the sugar pill can sometimes be a wonder drug. The administration of anything with the form of a treatment can do real good, and remarkably this applies even where the patient knows that “treatment” is nothing but a placebo. Administering placebos with extra ritual appears to redouble the effect, and so it would be no surprise, either, if a spoonful of mumbo-jumbo helped the medicine go down.
All this may sound like an argument for the NHS to give homeopathy a go. Sure, there might be, as the health service bluntly surmises, no decent evidence of any effect. Sure, too, the homeopathic practice of diluting agents until there are no molecules left defies not only science, but common sense too. No matter, it may be said, if the quackery can work placebo magic, then that’s OK. But this line of thinking is confused. Ministers are quite right to consider blacklisting homeopathy from the English health service.
For why should this one form of mock medicine be favoured over others? Until and unless homeopathy can outperform general placebo effects, it is surely better to stick with sugar pure and simple, rather than squandering time and effort on the dilution charade. In this era of punishingly tough financial choices, every frittered resource leaves the NHS failing to fund something else that’s important.
More controversially, there is also an educational duty on the NHS here; it is meant to foster public health, which means encouraging public understanding of science. It cannot do so while lending its chequebook and its good name to homeopathy. If magical thinking is allowed into one corner of medicine, then how are doctors supposed to root it out in other contexts? When, for example, they confront the smoker, who maintains, in the face of all evidence, that their habit will do them no harm because they know an old lady who reached 99 while getting through 30 a day; or the patient demanding antibiotics that cannot conceivably do anything at all for their viral infection?
Medics must grapple with many such irrational impulses. They will be best placed to do if they act consistently on the evidence. And that means saying no to homeopathy.
