ACCORDING to the headlines this week, NHS homoeopathy is in sharp decline. Only 37 per cent of NHS trusts provide any sort of homoeopathic service, and more than a quarter have stopped or reduced funding over the past year. This threatens the survival of those homoeopathic clinics that remain.
Homoeopathy has been available on the NHS since it was established in 1948. But the start of its decline can be traced back to a letter, sent in 2006 to all NHS trusts, from a group of doctors objecting to NHS funding for “unproven or disproved treatments”. It prompted many trusts to review their homoeopathy contracts, and many cited the need for evidence of efficacy to justify funding.
If the NHS withdrew funding for all treatments that had no evidence base to support them, there would be some considerable holes in conventional medicine services. We should be clear that this debate is not about whether homoeopathy works or not. It is about resources.
The area of allergy exemplifies exactly why homoeopathy needs to take a back seat in the face of competing priorities. This week, the medical director of the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital justified NHS funding for homoeopathy on the basis that it produced “a fairly large improvement” in 50 per cent of children with eczema.
But this week The Times also printed a letter from UK allergy experts urging the improvements in allergy services recommended by three recent reports. There are millions of people with allergies, but only a handful of specialist NHS clinics, and pitifully little training for GPs in this area. There has been a sevenfold rise in hospital admissions for life-threatening allergy attacks over the past decade, and these could be prevented by specialist assessment and treatment, which simply doesn’t exist owing to lack of investment.
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The relative few that are helped by homoeopathy have to be balanced against the needs of a much larger group currently with little or no services, some of whom will die without them. There is no question in my mind what health planners should do in these circumstances.
Of course, there should always be reasoned debate within trusts about priorities. Yes, complementary medicines such as homoeopathy cannot be dismissed simply because they don’t save lives they can greatly improve the quality of life of people with chronic diseases such as cancer and arthritis, if only because of the personal attention they offer.
But the fact is that NHS trusts can’t fund everything, treatments have to prioritised, and reality is a hard master.