Another Nail In The Coffin of Homeopathy

Great news! A recently published judicial review of the decision by the Lothian Health Board to defund homeopathy has given a sound slap in the face to anyone still left out there that thinks homeopathy has a shred of credibility left.

To give a little background; in January 2012 the Lothian Health Board conducted a review of the homeopathy service it was providing and concluded that the service was not worth funding any further. Any sensible person would immediately realise that this was because it would be unethical to provide public money to fund a 'treatment' based solely on pre-Victorian era magic. However, an idiot by the name of Honor Watt decided to challenge the decision by instigating a judicial review. She was aided by an undisclosed charity, the word on the street is that it was the British Homeopathic Association (BHA).

Even hardcore homeopaths know that they can't win an argument on the science, witchcraft doesn't stand up well to logical arguments, so the tactic used was to say that the decision made by the health board was discriminatory. They didn't say which particular characteristic had been discriminated against so I'm going to go right ahead and assume it's stupidity. Now, whenever an NHS body makes any kind of decision like this it is obliged to carry out an impact assessment with regard to potential discrimination. They had tried to gather as much demographic information as possible before the decision was taken but this was somewhat hampered by the fact that the homeopathy clinics didn't bother collecting even the most basic information about their patients, a highly unusual practice when one is supposedly performing a medical intervention. Anyhoo, on the information available they concluded that no one group of people would be unduly affected.

The killer blow came at the end of the judgement (paragraph 32). The judge, Lord Uist, said:

In any event, even if I had concluded that the Board had failed to comply with its PSED, I would have refused to reduce the decision under review.  It is plain that the Board, as it was entitled to do, accepted the view that there was no scientific evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy and that funding for it was a waste of the limited funds at its disposal.  In these circumstances the countervailing factor in this case was so powerful, indeed overwhelming, that no decision other than the one taken by the Board was conceivable.  A different decision, namely, to continue spending money on a service whose efficacy was not established, would have been unreasonable.

This basically means that, even if the decision had been discriminatory, he would not have overturned it as homeopathy has no basis in medical science and it would be unreasonable to fund it under any circumstance. These are strong and unequivocal statements. There are very few boards in the UK that still provide any funding for homeopathy, I think we're in to single digits now, but even one is too many. Hopefully this judgement will provide the impetus required to finally eradicate this wasteful and potentially harmful practice from public healthcare settings.

Samuel Hahnemann, the originator of the nonsense that is homeopathy