Homeopathy will not be banned by NHS despite critical report

Health minister Anne Milton said complementary and alternative medicine "has a long tradition" and very vocal people both in favour of it and against it.

A report by a group of MPs said homeopathic medicine should no longer be funded on the NHS and called for a ban on the medicines carrying medical claims on their labels.

The Commons Science and Technology Committee said there is no evidence the drugs are any more effective than a placebo - the same as taking a sugar or dummy pill and believing it works.

Last month, doctors attending the British Medical Association (BMA) annual conference backed this view, saying homeopathic remedies should be banned on the NHS and taken off pharmacy shelves where they are sold as medicines.

The treatment was described as "nonsense on stilts" and that patients would be better off buying bottled water.

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dear new scientist, are you missing a backbone?

From World of Weird Things.



I think I know what to get for New Scientist’s lawyers this holiday season: a spine. After one of the magazine’s editors wrote a brief guide on how to spot creationist weasel worlds and New Age pseudoscience, a guide much like you’d see on this blog, they pulled the piece because a certain Dr. James LeFanu whined about it and demanded that he be allowed to write a counter-comment before it goes back up.

Who is Dr. LeFanu? Oh just one of those desperate, attention seeking, New Age, post-modernist blowhards who write books on the limitations of science, and decry the concept of holding homeopathy to the same standards as conventional medicine as a witch hunt. Not only that, but since the editor who wrote the article in question also gave him a lackluster review, there’s an obvious hint of a personal vendetta, which the magazine’s lawyers should’ve just ignored and told LeFanu to find something better to do with his time than whine about his hurt feelings.

Here’s the thing. I know that cranks today are often rich, famous and spoiled rotten, and have a penchant for suing their critics if they don’t get their way, but that doesn’t mean that every time they huff and puff you should be afraid of them and give them column space.

LeFanu is just another post-modernist ditz spewing clichés in a book that decries science in the same way as the quantum woo-meisters on HuffPo, and since his attempt in this already over-crowded field failed, he’s desperate for attention. And what do you do when there’s a loon desperate for attention pounding on your door, demanding to be let in so he can have the spotlight and write a public comment to show everyone how relevant and important he is? That’s right, you tell him to go away, not give him exactly what he wants and encourage his bad behavior. Just like you don’t give kids candy after their temper tantrum, but put them into time out, so should you ignore self-important cranks who want to turn a very well known popular science publication into their bully pulpit while settling a score at the same time.

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Science Duck: The Huffington Post has a soft spot for pseudoscience

Mild mannered blogger PZ Myers over at Pharyngula recently labeled the Huffington Post a “stronghold of anti-scientific, anti-medicine woo.” I often check in with HuffPo for political commentary, so was bummed to see the litany of anti-science crimes that HuffPo has committed. Is it really the case that the Huffington Post gives blank checks to peddlers of pseudoscience? It seems so. Here are the numbers:

Method: A search was conducted for the word ‘homeopathic’ using the search box on three online news outlets’ web sites: The Huffington Post, NPR, and Fox News. The term ‘homeopathic’ was chosen because homeopathy is well established as a pseudoscientific practice that is now taking a serious beating in the UK, as physicians are calling for it to be removed from NHS coverage. The number of news stories containing the word ‘homeopathic’ were tallied for each news outlet, and each story was rated as to if it contained a favorable, unfavorable or neutral view of homeopathy.

Results:

• Fox news returned a total of 20 news stories; 5% were favorable towards homeopathy, 50% were unfavorable, and 45% were neutral.
• NPR returned a total of 8 news stories; 12.5% were favorable towards homeopathy, 50% were unfavorable, and 37.5% were neutral.
• The Huffington Post returned a total of 77 news stories; 68.83% were favorable toward homeopathy, 14.28% were unfavorable, and 16.88% were neutral.

Conclusion: Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that homeopathy is junk science, the Huffington Post appears to bias their ‘reporting’ to portray it as a valid medical practice. Both NPR and (even) FoxNews appear to err on the side of truth, and usually produce either neutral or completely honest accounts of homeopathy. Granted, HuffPo is a strange combination of proper news reporting and random bloggers’ opinions, so we should expect more woo to crop up. But it’s not a free-for-all either: their blog posts are in fact edited to fit their editorial guidelines. They’ve at least allowed a couple level-headed bloggers to post rational/evidence based discussions of homeopathy (e.g., Steven Newton, David Brenders), but give a much bigger soapbox to pet homeopaths and anti-science folks like Dana Ullman

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