The National Health Service (NHS) is a healthcare organization in the UK. Simon Singh, a self-proclaimed ‘free speech’ activist who has tried to silence multiple website that promote good nutrition, supplements, and homeopathic remedies over ‘traditional’ medicine is threatening legal action against regional health authorities who are part of the NHS if they continue to give any support to homeopathy.
Singh apparently doesn’t like homeopathic remedies. He is asking up to 30 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) around the UK to review their funding of homeopathic services in their regions.
Singh is among other critics of homeopathy in the UK including Edzard Ernst and David Colquhoun, some of whom are also critical of pharmaceutical company abuse of scientific protocols. But is he really in a position to put such leverage on homeopathic remedies when some people swear by them?
Read: What the Homeopathy Controversy is Really All About
The issue isn’t much about homeopathy specifically as it is about suppressing alternative treatments/medicine. The biomedical paradigm has narrowed the view of the practice of medicine to the treatment of specific diseases with supposedly symptom-specific drugs and procedures. An integral aspect of this approach to medicine is the assumption that the larger the dose of a drug, the stronger will be its effects, but homeopathy works in direct contrast to this belief.
It stands to reason, that even if homeopathic treatments were not as effective as thousands attest, there would be no need for copious pharmaceutical doses of meds. If that were indeed the case, the US would be the healthiest country in the world, and it is far from that.
Singh is asking up to Liverpool’s CCG, for example, to evaluate its £30,000 annually spent on homeopathy.
The total NHS spends on homeopathy is around £3m each year.
Singh is threatening the CCGs with legal action if they do not review, and halt their expenditures on homeopathy, which he regards as a waste of taxpayers’ money.
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