Having licences for medicines when they’re going to be handed out to homeopathic remedies?
Prof Colquhoun said that the claims could contravene consumer protection laws which ban “falsely claiming that a product is able to cure illnesses”.
The pills are labelled “a homoeopathic medicinal product used with the homoeopathic tradition for the symptomatic relief of sprains, muscular aches, and bruising or swelling after contusions.”
The average consumer is unlikely to know that “used with the homoeopathic tradition” is a form of weasel words that actually means “there isn’t a jot of evidence that the medicine works,” Prof Colquhoun wrote in a letter published online by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
10 responses so far ↓
1 Letters From A Tory // Jun 10, 2009 at 9:37 am
Isn’t A LOT of evidence? Surely there is NO decent evidence as yet, which is the problem. Why do we have these treatments being fobbed off onto us (and now onto the NHS) when the evidence base is basically non-existent?
2 Kit // Jun 10, 2009 at 9:57 am
This is nothing to do with medicine and all to with buying votes. This policy comes straight from one of Labours focus groups.
3 Cabalamat // Jun 10, 2009 at 10:04 am
I think all homeopathic medicines should come with a warning “this is a fake medicine. It doesn’t work” in big letters. Perhaps it could be accompanied by a picture of a pile of bullshit. Because that’s what homeopathy is.
4 agn // Jun 10, 2009 at 10:56 am
@LFAT,
nono, there isn’t a jot (sic) of evidence – means there is none. Jot comes from the greek letter iota, which is the smallest letter in the alphabet (looks like an i without the dot over it).
5 JuliaM // Jun 10, 2009 at 11:18 am
I think Kit’s correct, the target audience for this sort of thing is the upper-middle-class ‘worried well’, the type that gulp echinacea by the handful, buy only organic, etc…
6 Ed // Jun 10, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Perhaps it could be accompanied by a picture of a pile of bullshit. Because that’s what homeopathy is.
Cabalamat, perhaps more literally than you meant. If this water memory idea is correct, as the homeopaths believe, surely the water molecules will also remember the time they were shaken violently along with various feces when they last went through, for example, a sewerage works or a cow’s digestive tract?
7 jono // Jun 10, 2009 at 12:23 pm
How dumb is this:
“Homeopathic remedies are made by diluting ingredients many thousands of times.
The treatment is based on the idea that extremely small amounts of a substance that would otherwise make people ill can be used to cure them. ”
Medical Correspondent my arse.
8 jus'askin // Jun 10, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Look on the bright side.
Those that treat real medical complaints with homoeopathic mumbo jumbo will die earlier.
Evolution in action.
It’s a feature not a bug
9 David Gillies // Jun 10, 2009 at 4:36 pm
jus’askin:
“Those that treat [dispense] real medical complaints with homoeopathic mumbo jumbo will die earlier.”
In my ideal world, this would be true, because they would be rounded up, herded into cattle trucks, and gassed.
10 Brian // Jun 10, 2009 at 5:48 pm
It escapes me why anyone needs to buy homeopathic medicine at all, since there are limitless supplies of every homeopathic remedy available from the cold tap.
Of course, this should be evidence that they don’t work, as we are all getting ill all the time.
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