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The UK's New Minister For Magic
An anonymous reader sends this depressing excerpt from New Scientist:
"A serious blow to science-based medical practices has been dealt in the UK with the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as Health Secretary. The fortunes of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) are about to be transformed with the help of the magical waters of homeopathic medicine. Top marks to The Telegraph's science writer Tom Chivers for quickly picking up on talk that the UK's new health minister, Jeremy Hunt – who replaced Andrew Lansley yesterday in a government reshuffle – thinks that homeopathy works, and should be provided at public expense by the NHS."
There is zero scientific evidence homeopathy works. Absolutely none.
I can only assume this guy is either a moron who believes in homeopathy, or, more likely, he is receiving bribes from companies that make homeopathic products. If the NHS were to pay for homeopathic medicine there would be a huge amount of profit to be made.
What he is doing is a disservice to all the UK citizens who will need real medical care in their lives and may be misdirected to rely on homeopathy, which cannot ever heal or cure them in any way.
It's like having government-funded exorcisms or voodoo rituals to cleanse the bad mojo out of a person. Sounds crazy, right?
That is not how it works.
They must prove it actually does work.
The placebo effect is well known and that they why they must test their magic water against a control group given normal water in a well controlled double blind trial. The problem with that is ethical. Since there is no evidence that homeopathy works testing it on sick people would not survive any ethical review if it interfered with real treatment.
No, not really.
0) The NHS is excellent - far better than American healthcare. I say that using all the data I have seen and from personal experience of both systems.
1) The UK government does not have a "virtual monopoly" - it has no exclusive right to provide healthcare at all. It does provide some forms of healthcare so well (e.g. emergency) that alternative providers are fairly rare, and other forms of healthcare with waiting lists (e.g. elective hip replacements) such that there's a healthy variety of private providers. I belong to a mutual much older than the NHS which provides discretionary treatment for elective conditions.
2) Thatcher was an idiot put in charge, but the NHS soldiered on. Blair was an idiot put in charge, but the NHS soldiered on. Major and Brown stuck their dicks in a bit but didn't do anything remarkable compared to their superior predecessors. It was Lansley who has done the most damage to the NHS with the Health and Social Care Act 2012, not because he is an idiot but because he's a fucking smart and fucking nasty man. Cunt, already widely known in Britain as corrupt, silly little man, is just pissing on the wreckage.
3) The NHS didn't really exist before 1948, and that was in the wake of something far worse than we're facing now. If things get shit, we regroup, re-educate and rebuild. It's not like history has a linear progression - we're always repeating the same mistakes and having to correct them.
A basic precept of science is that you can't prove a negative.
Can we please stop circulating this little bit of folk "wisdom" now?
Proofs of non-existence by reductio ad absurdum are common. Euler's proof of the non-existance of a largest prime number is one notable example.
More discussion here.
If the illness is not too severe, it's not terribly unethical to test ineffective treatments.* And some such studies have been done. Here's one on warts, and another on migraines. Needless to say, there was no statistically significant effect.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
All you have to answer is does it work (better than placebos in a double-blind trial)?
This seems terribly unfair, given the increasing effectiveness of placebos over time.
Seriously. http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all Given that particular standard, current drugs be more effective than they would have in the past in order to successfully pass clinical trials.
perception of pain
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Pain is the perception of injury. Pain is a psychological entity. You cannot be wrong about the amount of pain you feel. If you feel pain from an amputated limb, the pain is completely real.
Anything that reduces pain is effective in treating pain. It may be useless in treating injury, but a lot of modern medicine is around pain management for the vast array of problems we can't actually cure.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If you read the Early Day Motion he signed in 2007, he says is that he "believes that complementary medicine has the potential to offer clinically-effective and cost-effective solutions to common health problems faced by NHS patients" (emphasis mine). To be fair, he was only one of 206 MPs (including such luminaries as Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister) who signed the motion. That's almost a third of British MPs who believe the NHS should be spending upwards of £4 million* per year treating sick people with something that works no better than a sugar pill.
* This is from the £12 million 2005-2008 expenditure figures for homeopathy obtained by Channel 4, which apparently doesn't include the running costs of the NHS homeopathic hospitals that the Early Day Motion is supporting.