If it’s so good why don’t doctors use it?

COST SAVINGS
Research showed that French GPs who integrated homeopathy into their practices, made an annual saving of 20% with no loss of clinical results. At a time when the NHS is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, this research indicates homeopathy has the potential to save it £25 Billion a year and crucially reduce antibiotic use. That saving would increase year on year as homeopathy increasingly became part of an integrated system. Think how many pro-health campaigns could be paid for, how much preventative education and increased staffing could be funded. [1]

The UK government is currently held hostage by the pharmaceutical industry.
The annual NHS drugs bill is £18 Billion but the industry still presses for price increases and the government acquiesces. Over the last few years, increases of up to 2000% have been allowed on commonly used drugs.

Pharmaceutical medicine may have its place but not at the exclusion of safe, effective and affordable medicines.

REAL SCIENCE IS INCREASINGLY RARE
By definition science and medicine involve investigation, asking pertinent questions, and being open minded to new possibilities that had not been considered before. History is littered with examples of fundamental advances that would never have seen the light of day if the researchers had abandoned their work because it didn’t fit with the accepted knowledge at the time.

The pressure on medical doctors to dismiss, and if pressed, to disparage homeopathy is immense. This is a tragedy for both them and their patients.
Many medical homeopaths in practice today were also sceptical until they witnessed homeopathy at work in a clinical setting. Unable to dismiss its obvious potential, they were compelled to investigate further and most then took additional training in order to be able to successfully prescribe homeopathy in their practice.

Professional homeopaths who are not already medically trained undergo a rigorous four year training. The majority of practising professionals left a successful career to retrain, after their own long standing ‘incurable’ complaint was finally resolved using homeopathy. They felt inspired to enable others to discover and benefit from homeopathy’s potential.

MONEY MEANS POWER MORE MONEY MEANS MORE POWER
Until the turn of the 20th century there were five in-bed homeopathic hospitals in the UK.  Now these hospitals have been closed (or renamed), not because they were not successful but because they fell victim to an orchestrated campaign, driven by the determination of the pharmaceutical industry to become a global monopoly.

The global market for pharmaceuticals reached $1.2 trillion in 2018, and is predicted to hit $1.5 trillion by 2023, making it one of the most powerful industries on planet Earth. [2]
That amount of financial clout can be very effective in ensuring a corporate monopoly. Other complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) present a potential threat, albeit small, to their market share; but as new ways of looking at health and wellness are gaining ground, the market share for CAMs in general is growing exponentially. This presents a problem for an industry bent on being a monopoly. At its core homeopathy is a primary care medicine, and as the fastest growing system of medicine on the planet, presents a particular challenge.

In the last decade the focus on health, clean living, healthy diets, personal responsibility and the ability of patients to research their conditions on the internet has seen a massive increase in every demographic.
There’s a real sense of self-empowerment. Patients are much more likely to ask questions about their treatment. They want to be a partner in the process, not just the recipient of a hastily scribbled prescription.
People in general are demanding more information and the balance of power between the doctor and the patient is levelling out. Patients are searching out help for themselves online and asking their doctor for their opinion.
This is most easily seen in the area of vaccines where parents are educating themselves and asking insightful questions about safety studies and potential adverse effects.
Some doctors have pushed back and suggested they won’t work with ‘Dr. Google’, yet they admit they do not have the time to fulfil their legal obligation to educate a patient sufficiently to make a fully informed choice.

THE ORCHESTRATED ANTI-HOMEOPATHY CAMPAIGN
In this context the orchestrated campaign against CAMs and in particular against homeopathy has increased in intensity. In a deliberate move, Google has changed its algorithms so that it is increasingly difficult to find information about alternative approaches to health online.
Google now owns a pharmaceutical division headed by GlaxosSmithKline’s former chairman of its global vaccine business.  In 2013, Google founded Calico, a research and development facility focused on the discovery of treatments associated with age-related diseases. In 2015 they founded Verily Life Sciences and partnered with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to create Galvani Bioelectronics for the development of “bioelectronic medicines.” [3] [4]

Facebook, criticised for allowing fake news to proliferate during the US 2016 election, now refuses to share posts about alternative approaches to health or puts a “corrective” notice underneath posts to highlight that they consider the user’s post to be fake news.

Merck is just one example of how loyalty to shareholders dictates their business model. In 2004 Merck took a hit when their blockbuster pain medication Vioxx, was found to double the rate of heart attacks in patients. A reported 60,000 patients died as a result, although a conservative estimate of under reporting puts the number of deaths at least twice that. The company was forced to withdraw the drug, and despite knowing there were serious problems before its release to the public, vows to fight every case brought against Vioxx in the courts. Merck is known to fund patient advocacy groups. They funded the Women in Government group to push legislation for mandatory HPV vaccine scross 20 US states. The company are back on track and reported revenues of $42.5 Billion in 2018 with a 40.2% total return for investors. [5]
In recent years groups of online trolls have been trained to disrupt groups raising valid concerns about vaccines and pharmaceutical drugs.
The trolls are paid to “correct facts” about pharmaceutical products or to discredit alternative suggestions. These employees (astroturfers) are specially trained in distraction and diversion techniques, and can be found online attacking anyone who questions the safety of pharmaceutical products products.

In the US the pharmaceutical industry pays the Food and Drug Administration to fast track drugs to market, and operates a revolving door between corporations and drug approval panels. It would be difficult to find a bigger conflict of interest and it is the patients who suffer when the drugs come to market. [6]
Given what we know about the pharmaceutical industry and the lengths they will go to protect their profits, it should come as no surprise that this has included an orchestrated campaign to prevent an alternative like homeopathy from gaining traction with the public.

This orchestrated anti-homeopathy campaign is now global and HINT is joining with homeopathic groups in other countries, who are also working to keep the choice of homeopathy available for their citizens.

UK SCIENCE DENIERS WORKING HARD
In the UK groups like the Good Thinking Society REF have lobbied administrators in Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and at the NHS to demand homeopathy is removed from patient choice.
In response CCGs have removed homeopathy from their budgets and under threat of a Judicial Review instigated by the Good Thinking Society they no longer offer referrals.
The Good Thinking Society now uses the lack of CCG referrals as evidence that the public’s demand for homeopathy has fallen dramatically because the public have realised that homeopathy is ineffective and should not be funded by the public purse! A better example of deliberate circular thinking would be hard to find.

Dr Ben Goldacre, medical doctor and certainly no friend of homeopathy, describes the pharmaceutical industry in his book Bad Pharma as a “…‘$600 billion business rife with corruption and greed’, and acknowledges that the trials ‘proving’ that drugs work are almost always funded by the same companies that profit from their sale.
Editors of prestigious journals like The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine have publically stated that less than 50% of medical research can be trusted. [7], [8] [9]

Read more on our Research Pages ….

Homeopathy has been part of the NHS since its inception in 1948 and referrals to the homeopathic hospitals could be made by any GP.
Given how closely homeopathy was integrated into UK public healthcare, it was obvious that any orchestrated campaign would need to focus on getting homeopathy removed from the NHS.

There was a move in 2018 to prevent homeopathic vets using homeopathy as a first line treatment. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons directed all vets to use the pharmaceutical option first and only if that failed were they allowed to use the safe, gentle and effective option they wanted to use in the first place.
To literally add insult to injury, this was done in the name of animal safety.
The denialists forget that a large proportion of homeopathic patients, both human and animal, are using homeopathy because pharmaceutical medicine has already FAILED them.

FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONCERTED EFFORT – WE ARE STILL HERE
It has been more than 15 years of concerted and relentless effort, with the backing of the media, certain important members of the government and so-called ‘medical experts’ and ‘scientists’, to finally remove the cost of homeopathic prescriptions form the NHS budget. The campaign focused on an alleged waste of public money funding homeopathic prescriptions at a time when the NHS was strapped for cash. That campaign saved the NHS £92,000 from a drugs bill of £18 billion, although since the inexpensive homeopathic medicines would presumably be replaced by more expensive pharmaceutical drugs, it is likely there would be no saving at all and on the contrary, an increase in the drugs bill. To put this into perspective, in 2016 the NHS were spending £780,000 A DAY on Prozac, a drug proven to be no better than placebo. In terms of the stated desire to ‘save’ the NHS money, it might be interesting to question the campaign’s real motives.
After all their effort, medical doctors can still prescribe homeopathic medicine within the NHS (and do), because clinical judgement is their right. In the media this is reported as the NHS banning homeopathy.

In the face of the latest research into high dilutions and material science, the focus of these denialists (who call themselves skeptics, but this is a misnomer because they are not interested in rational debate, only in denial) has shifted from ridiculing homeopathy as placebo because the rate of dilution is so high, to homeopathy is dangerous. They have tried very hard to make this assertion stick, but the best they can do is suggest that patients might use homeopathy and waste valuable time before seeking “proper medicine” and so risk their dis-ease becoming more serious.

Using the threat of ridicule, David Colqhoun, professor of chemistry at UCL made it his mission to force closure of university undergraduate courses in homeopathy. Only one course remains.

What is interesting to note is that NONE of the denialists, those claiming homeopathy doesn’t work, demanding homeopathy be removed from the NHS, working to close down undergraduate programmes, attacking individual homeopaths and their profession bodies, have any training or experience in homeopathy. NONE. Just to be clear, that’s NONE at all.

Not Emeritus Professor Edzard Ernst, the self-proclaimed world expert on CAMs, who seems to have made it his life’s work to bring down homeopathy; nor Simon Singh, former physicist and BBC science producer, affiliate of Sense About Science, architect of the Nightingale Collaboration, founder of the Good Thinking Society, and now rock star of the denialists; nor any of their many minions. That’s NONE. (REF to who these groups are)

WIKIPEDIA CAN’T BE TRUSTED
Wikipedia is often the first place we look to if we are researching a topic. It is after all a people’s encyclopedia, in theory developed and corrected by anyone with an internet connection.
According to the Washington Post, the two most controversial topics on Wikipedia are Jesus Christ and Homeopathy.
Jimmy Wales, the founder and owner of Wikipedia, is a self-confessed anti-homeopathy campaigner and Wikipedia’s homeopathy page is set up to reflect that. Any attempt to correct the inaccurate information there immediately reverts back to the original misinformation. Wikipedia “editors” are alerted to any changes made, and unless these changes comply with the anti-homeopathy viewpoint, they are removed, often within minutes.
Members of the homeopathic community have attempted for years to correct the misinformation to no avail.
To those who don’t understand the underpinning principles of homeopathy this might seem amusing, but this is harmful. It denies access to information about a safe and effective option. It denies freedom of choice. For patients who have been failed by pharmaceutical medicine, often after years of suffering, this can be life changing, and in some cases this can be fatal.

Everyone should be free to choose what they do and don’t use to maintain their health, Jimmy Wales included.

CREATING A DANGEROUS MONOPOLY
In the immediate future, when antimicrobial resistance (AMR) reaches a tipping point, even routine surgery will become a huge risk.
Orchestrating a situation where reliance to solve the problem of AMR rests solely on pharmaceutical medicine, as is their intention, would be the gravest of errors.

Fortunately, despite all their efforts, 7.4 million people in the UK use homeopathy and this number is increasing year on year.

THE ENEMY OF SCIENCE IS A CLOSED MIND.

References
[1]  Aurélie Colas, Karine Danno, Cynthia Tabar, Jenifer Ehreth, Gérard Duru
Economic impact of homeopathic practice in general medicine in France
Health Economics Review 2015, 5:18
[2] https://pharmaceuticalcommerce.com/business-and-finance/global-pharma-spending-will-hit-1-5-trillion-in-2023-says-iqvia/
[3]  https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/01/google-gsk-bioelectronic-medicines-verily-life-sciences-alphabet
[4] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/google-pharma-startup-investments/
[5] https://corpwatch.org/article/mercks-murky-dealings-hpv-vaccine-lobby-backfires
[6]  https://www.biospace.com/article/investigation-examines-big-pharma-payments-to-fda-advisers/
[7] Dr Ben Goldacre. Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. Pub UK 2012, Fourth Estate, Pub US 2013 Faber and Faber
[8]  [6]  Horton R. Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?
The Lancet, Vol 385, issue 9976, pg 1380 April 2015
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext
[9]  Angell M. Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption. The New York Review of Books magazine. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/