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Why are MDs so afraid?by Terry A. Rondberg, DC, founder and CEO of the World Chiropractic Alliance
The vote doesn't make sense from a medical standpoint. An estimated 17% of the British population use homeopathic medicines (according to a 2000 House of Lords report), a 1986 survey in the British Medical Journal (now BMJ) that showed that 42% of physicians referred patients to homeopathic doctors, and a 1990 survey of British pharmacists that found 55% considered homeopathic medicines "useful," while just 14% considered them "useless." The vote doesn't make sense from a patient safety standpoint. I couldn't find a single documented case of a death or serious injury caused by any homeopathic remedy. Whereas, in the US, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that more than 230,000 deaths happen each year in hospitals as the result of poor or improper medical and surgical care by physicians, making medicine the third leading cause of death in America. In the UK, as many as 90,000 patient deaths a year could be linked to hospital errors, according to a 2007 study in the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care. The vote doesn't make sense from a legal standpoint. In the US, during 1990-2004, only five medical malpractice reports were made to the National Practitioner Databank regarding homeopaths (NPDB Summary Report, National Practitioner Data Bank, US DHHS). Only 11 homeopaths and naturopaths had a malpractice report made against them in the US 1990-2003 (2003 Annual Report, National Practitioner Data Bank, US DHHS). That's less than 1% of all doctors. I didn't find equivalent statistics for the UK, but I'm willing to bet they'd be about the same. The vote doesn't make sense from a scientific standpoint. The MDs, who love to position themselves as evidence-based practitioners who rely on science, also urged the NHS to stop funding any homeopathic research. Why? Because there's insufficient research to support homeopathic benefits. Huh? There's not enough research, so they urge the government to stop doing any more research? How logical is that? It isn't logical. It's simply a way of lashing out at a competitor, based on arrogance, fear, and ignorance. The arrogance was most evident in Tom Dolphin, the BMA junior doctors committee vice-chair, who first proposed banning homeopathy at the BMA annual junior doctors conference in May. "I got into trouble for saying at the juniors conference that homeopathy is witchcraft," he admitted. "'I take that back and apologise to the witches I apparently offended by association. Homeopathy isn’t witchcraft — it is nonsense on stilts. It is pernicious nonsense that feeds into a rising wave of irrationality that threatens the hard won gains of the enlightenment, and the scientific method.’ He warned that society risked "sinking back into a state of magical thinking, where made-up science passes for rational discourse, and wishing for something to be true counts as proof." The only way we risk sinking back into ignorance is to close our minds to all healing avenues and refuse to research the widest possible range of ideas and approaches. Why would the BMA call for such a backward and illogical action? A report published on the Huffington Post website offers some clues. Dana Ullman, MPH, author of nine books on homeopathy, explains that homeopathy was the most frequently used non-medical approach in five out of 14 surveyed countries in Europe and among the three most frequently used CAM therapies in 11 out of 14 surveyed countries. Approximately 100 million Europeans use homeopathic medicines. Furthermore, the sales of homeopathic and anthroposophical medicines grew by 60% between 1995 and 2005, from 590 million Euros in 1995 to 775 million Euros in 2001 and to $930 million Euros in 2005. There are five homeopathic hospitals working within the NHS, some of them with a two-year waiting list for non-emergency visits to a homeopath. "Because of homeopathy's impressive and growing popularity in Europe, this alternative treatment poses a significant threat to conventional medicine, which may explain why there are ongoing efforts to attack it (and homeopaths) using devious and questionably ethical means," he explained. "Despite the use and acceptance of homeopathy throughout the UK, there is a very active group of skeptics, with significant Big Pharma funding, who work vigorously to attack this system of natural medicine," he added. He pointed specifically to a group called Sense about Science, which has been particularly vocal in its opposition to homeopathy. "Sense about Science is a registered UK charity despite being a political pressure group. As such they have to divulge their sources of income which they do on their website. Not surprisingly, much of this comes from named pharmaceutical manufacturers," Ullman noted. The donor list includes companies and organizations such as the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, and Unilever. All non-medical health care and wellness professionals should be alarmed by this latest move by the allopathic industry to suppress all competitive practices. To paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemöller: First they came for the homeopaths and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a homeopath….
Read more:Huffington Post: The Case FOR Homeopathic Medicine: The Historical and Scientific Evidence Homeopathic Medicine: Europe's #1 Alternative for Doctors The Irish Times: War against homeopathy Sue Young Homeopathy -- biography of Fewster Robert Horner, a virulent skeptic of homeopathy who voted against homeopathy in the infamous Brighton resolutions of 1851, and who was solely responsible for suppressing the statistics presented by the London Homeopathic Hospital during the cholera epidemic of 1854. Wikipedia: article on Sense about Science (Dr. Terry A. Rondberg is founder and CEO of the World Chiropractic Alliance and publisher of The Chiropractic Journal. His reports on other health and wellness news appear on www.terryarondberg.com, www.terryrondberg.com.)
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At the annual meeting of the British Medical Association, MDs voted to ban homeopathy from the National Health Service (NHS), meaning that the government would stop paying for any homeopathic services. Furthermore, the medics say all homeopathic products should be marked "Placebo" and should not be sold by pharmacists.