HOMEOPATHIC TREATMENTS should not be paid for by the National Health Service in the United Kingdom because there is no evidence that they work, House of Commons MPs have declared.
Homeopathy, which operates on the principle of “like cures like”, seeks to treat patients with highly-diluted samples of substances which would cause illness in a healthy individual.
However, the Commons Science and Technology Committee said the evidence that it works is “theoretically weak”, and the claims that the diluted formulas hold an “imprint of substances previously dissolved in them” are “scientifically implausible”.
Now, the MPs are demanding a full investigation into how much the NHS – which has paid for homeopathic treatments since it was founded in 1948 – has spent on them over the last decade.
The existing UK regulatory system committee operates “more in the interests of those who produce homeopathic ‘medicines’ rather than in support of public health”, committee chairman Phil Willis charged.
So far, the system run by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority has approved just one product – Arnica Montana 30C – though the MPs claimed that it contained nothing other than water.
By offering homeopathy on the NHS and State licensing, the British Government “runs the risk of endorsing homeopathy as an efficacious system of medicine”, the report published yesterday declared.