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Simply a diluted remedy based on crank theory
• IF your correspondent Lesley Mair (Treatment can work, December 20) could come up with another 999 people with similar medical symptoms who have also been “cured” by homeopathy, there would be less of an argument about its efficacy.
The trouble is neither she nor the “hundreds of thousands of patients it has helped,” can produce any such evidence in respect of any medical condition whatever.
And this, don’t forget, is over 200 years after these theories were propounded.
Furthermore, homeopathy does not treat patients at “their root cause;” instead it gives them an infinitely diluted “remedy” based on a crank theory that like cures like. It says that something which causes a rash can, when infinitely diluted, cure a rash. And when I say “infinitely diluted” the homeopathic industry’s own “formula” means the remedy is so highly diluted that to have just one molecule of the “active ingredient” would require an amount of water occupying more space than the whole of the known universe!
I am happy to allow people to believe what they like and pay through the nose for it too, but I do not want one penny of my money to be spent on giving people water, unless it can be conclusively shown that this cures their disease.
Every single pharmaceutical product must provide this evidence and, if homeopathy could, its use would be justified.
In addition to providing such evidence of a medicine’s performance, your correspondent fails to mention that even “the pharmaceutical industry’s heavy propaganda” has to meet the rigorous cost-benefit requirements of NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence).
And, as in the argument about the use of Velcade in treating Myeloma cancer which your pages have documented in recent weeks, NICE sometimes remains unconvinced by the benefits of the pharmaceutical industry’s products.
It’s all about evidence, not blind belief. So please, Camden Primary Care Trust, don’t pay for homeopathy, use our money for treatments that have been shown to work.
DAVID REED
Eton Avenue, NW3
• YOUR reporter Jamie Welham refers (Defenders of homeopathy take on PCT, December 13) to homeopathy as a “controversial form of alternative medicine offered on the NHS at RLHH and other hospitals”.
Homeopathy does not claim to be an alternative medicine as a substitute for conventional medicine – supplementing conventional treatment in accordance with the individual characteristics of the patient.
The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital provides numerous other complementary therapies besides homeopathy. We have personally benefited from several of them.
The primary care trust does not have the power to “close” the RLHH, though it could pressurise general practitioners from the government to save cash in order to “find the money” for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq , as the then Chancellor Gordon Brown once put it so memorably.
A prominent antagonist of the RLHH appears to be UCH Professor Michael Baum. The RLHH is patronised by HM The Queen. The treatments offered by the RLHH are accepted by the official National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.
Is Professor Baum right and all of them wrong?
Curiously the RLHH is part of the UCL Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Isn’t it unprofessional publicly to rubbish one’s medical colleagues?
On other pages of your excellent publications there are paid advertisements for privately-provided complementary and alternative therapies.
There are private clinics providing such therapies in practically every town in the country. Good luck to them.
The RLHH has the additional advantage that such therapies are provided free of charge at the point of use by medical doctors who are qualified in both conventional and complementary therapies.
FLORENCE and IVOR KENNA
Compton Street, EC1
• I WAS quite angry with the words of Professor Baum (Defenders of homeopathy take on PCT, December 13).
It is so true that the pharmaceutical lobby is very powerful with a trillion plus industry that homeopathy cannot compete with.
Almost anyone can prescribe drugs, it’s a question of knowing the statistics. Not every doctor is a good homeopathic one, however, as it requires years of experience and sharpened perception.
My father was a Harley Street doctor and a homeopath and an independent researcher who worked with Aston University on his non-toxic cure for cancer. I have seen many amazing results with his treatments, without any side effects. Old patients, and people that they recommended, are still calling up from time to time upset as they say only my father got such amazing results.
I have seen countless chronic diseases cured by homeopathic means, just as I have seen modern medicine cause miracles with acute afflictions.
My father was the first to use both modalities.
Anecdotally, from teaching my own Alignment Therapy for 40 years, I do know that the smaller the module of correction, the quicker the body will self correct.
Taking drugs on a gross level for long periods inevitably produce bad side effects. For acute illness that works fine, but for chronic illness the patient sometimes dies of the medication rather than the original illness.
PRIMAVERA BOMAN - BEHRAM
address supplied
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