British MPs Tell Gov’t: Stop Funding Homeopathy

In a clear statement on the absurdity of public funding and regulation of homeopathy, British MPs instructed government to stop paying for homeopathy, shut down homeopathic hospitals, cease all homeopathy clinical trials, and to crack down on homeopathic efficacy claims.

Committee chairman Phil Willis MP said; “We were seeking to determine whether the Government’s policies on homeopathy are evidence based on current evidence. They are not.”

Homeopathy doesn’t work. It can’t work. If it did, physics, biochemistry and pharmacology as pharmacists know it would be false. Yet this elaborate placebo system persists, supported in part by the pharmacy profession, which seems comfortable selling products with no active ingredients and no evidence of efficacy.

I have blogged previously about the British inquiry into homeopathy, the public relations disaster for Boots the Chemist (selling their own store brand of homeopathy), and the effectiveness of the “10-23″ protesters, who staged a mass homeopathic overdose, where, not surprisingly, nothing untoward happened to anyone.

The final report from the British inquiry has been released. It scrutinized government policies on homeopathy, and gives direction to the National Health Service.  But the recommendations apply to any country (like Canada) that legitimizes homeopathy.

Here is the Press Release which summarizes the 273 page report :

In a report published today, the Science and Technology Committee concludes that the NHS should cease funding homeopathy. It also concludes that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) should not allow homeopathic product labels to make medical claims without evidence of efficacy. As they are not medicines, homeopathic products should no longer be licensed by the MHRA.

The Committee carried out an evidence check to test if the Government’s policies on homeopathy were based on sound evidence. The Committee found a mismatch between the evidence and policy. While the Government acknowledges there is no evidence that homeopathy works beyond the placebo effect (where a patient gets better because of their belief in the treatment), it does not intend to change or review its policies on NHS funding of homeopathy.

The Committee concurred with the Government that the evidence base shows that homeopathy is not efficacious (that is, it does not work beyond the placebo effect) and that explanations for why homeopathy would work are scientifically implausible.

The Committee concluded—given that the existing scientific literature showed no good evidence of efficacy—that further clinical trials of homeopathy could not be justified.

In the Committee’s view, homeopathy is a placebo treatment and the Government should have a policy on prescribing placebos. The Government is reluctant to address the appropriateness and ethics of prescribing placebos to patients, which usually relies on some degree of patient deception. Prescribing of placebos is not consistent with informed patient choice—which the Government claims is very important—as it means patients do not have all the information needed to make choice meaningful.

Beyond ethical issues and the integrity of the doctor-patient relationship, prescribing pure placebos is bad medicine. Their effect is unreliable and unpredictable and cannot form the sole basis of any treatment on the NHS.

The report also examines the MHRA licensing regime for homeopathic products. The Committee is particularly concerned over the introduction of the National Rules Scheme (NRS) in 2006, as it allows medical indications on the basis of study reports, literature and homeopathic provings and not on the basis of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) – the normal requirement for medicines that make medical claims.

The MHRA’s user-testing of the label for Arnica Montana 30C—the only product currently licensed under the NRS—was poorly designed, with some parts of the test little more than a superficial comprehension test of the label and other parts actively misleading participants to believe that the product contains an active ingredient.

The product labelling for homeopathic products under all current licensing schemes fails to inform the public that homeopathic products are sugar pills containing no active ingredients. The licensing regimes and deficient labelling lend a spurious medical legitimacy to homeopathic products.

The last sentence can equally be applied to Health Canada and its Natural Health Products Directorate, which also endeavors to assign unique numbers to indistinguishable bottles of sugar pills.

The major recommendation related to the sale of homeopathy is as follows, and relates to the implied endorsement (through licensure) of homeopathic products by the MHRA, which is the UK equivalent to Health Canada or the FDA:

We consider that the way to deal with the sale of homeopathic products is to remove any medical claim and any implied endorsement of efficacy by the MHRA—other than where its evidential standards used to assess conventional medicines have been met—and for the labelling to make it explicit that there is no scientific evidence that homeopathic products work beyond the placebo effect.

Anthony Cox, an English pharmacist who blogs at the excellent Black Triangle blog has the following analysis:

The committee stops short of suggesting homeopathy should not be sold by pharmacies, instead preferring that they are sold honestly. The central problem with homeopathy is the legitimacy given to it by NHS funding and government regulation. Tackling that will improve the position pharmacists are put in.

However, there is still plenty of work to be done in pharmacy. How can it be that there is a registered pharmacy regulated by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society supplying Leptospira, leprosy, and hepatitis remedies openly over the internet? It’s hard to reconcile that pharmacy’s continued registration with the Society’s position on homeopathy.

It’s time to begin the discussion in Canada. Why does Health Canada states that their approval of a homeopathic product means that it is safe, effective, and of high quality, when it’s clear that homeopathy is a placebo, and has no active ingredients? Why does Health Canada allow anecdotal evidence as evidence of efficacy statements for these products? Why are Canadian pharmacies told that the sale of homeopathy is acceptable, when  Health Canada has given its stamp of approval? And why are Ontario, British Columbia, and other provinces endorsing and expanding the roles for alternative health practitioners, that are trained and “qualified” in homeopathic pseudoscience?

More coverage here:

Black Triangle: Homeopathy and Pharmacy

Ben Goldacre: Parliamentary Sci Tech Committee on Homeopathy

Gimpy’s Blog: The Evidence Check on Homeopathy – a merciless punch to its vitalist organs (despite attempts to water down report)

Podblack Cat: Recommendation – Homeopathy Gone From The NHS!

The Quackometer: The Bleakest Day for Homeopathy

Australian Skeptics: UK Government committee recommends public funds pulled from homeopathy

Filed under: commentary, updates Tagged: #ten23, homeopathy

Pharmacies Targeted in Mass Homeopathy Overdose

Hundreds of protesters will gather outside Boots pharmacies on January 30 to swallow entire bottles of  homeopathic remedies and embarrass a profession that sells them in the absence of any evidence of efficacy.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about the 10:23 protest which was gathering momentum in the United Kingdom. Recall that in late 2009, a senior executive from Alliance Boots, a UK pharmacy chain, admitted that there is no clinical evidence to support homeopathic products, yet Boots sells these products strictly because of consumer demand.

Homeopathy is an elaborate placebo system of “remedies” with no active ingredients.  Based on the absurd notion of “like cures like”, proponents of homeopathy believe that any substance can be an effective remedy if it’s diluted enough: raccoon fur, the sunlight reflecting off Saturn, even pieces of the Berlin Wall are all part of the homeopathic pharmacopeia.  And when I say dilute, I mean dilute. The 30C “potency” is common – it’s a ratio of 10^-60.  You would have to give two billion doses per second, to six billion people, for 4 billion years, to deliver a single molecule of the original material. That’s dilute.

Homeopathy could be written off as a harmless nostrum if it caused no harm. But a review of What’s the Harm suggests otherwise. Most importantly, homeopathy delays patients from seeking science-based treatments. But when they’re stocked on pharmacy shelves, it’s unfair and unethical to expect patients to be able to able to distinguish real drugs from placebos. Selling homeopathy in pharmacies legitimizes an industry which deserves none, and skeptics plan to “overdose” on these products to shame Boots into putting patient care ahead of profits.

The 10:23 protest has attracted widespread media attention including prominent coverage in the The Guardian and the BBC.  Here is a sample of what’s being written about the protest, and the pharmacy profession:

10:23, Homeopathy, and the Shame of the Pharmacy Profession:

The pharmacy profession has been granted statutory privileges to dispense medicines to the public. They do so under a code of practice that insists they do act with ‘honesty and integrity’, that they do not ‘exploit the vulnerability or lack of knowledge of others’, and that they “provide accurate and impartial information to ensure that [they] you do not mislead others or make claims that cannot be justified”

When pharmacists on the high street accept cash for homeopathic pseudo-medicines that promise to relieve their customers of hay fever symptoms, help insomnia, or sooth a baby’s teething pain, they appear to be ignoring their professional standards in the pursuit of profits.

The professional code of ethics of a pharmacists would suggest that they are required to provide the customer with all the “necessary and relevant information”. It is surely necessary to inform someone that they are buying a worthless product that cannot work as described and there is no reason to suppose it does. Pharmacists must fall into two camps here: those that believe that homeopathic preparations do work as described, in which case they are simply incompetent, and those that shut up for fear of their jobs and for an easy life.

Ouch.

Homeopathy by the Mind-Boggling Numbers (Times Online):

To put homeopathy in a medicinal context, if you wanted to consume a normal 500mg paracetamol dose you would need ten million billion homeopathic pills. Where each pill is the same mass as the Milky Way galaxy. There is actually not enough matter in the entire known Universe to make the homeopathic equivalent of a single paracetamol pill.

So why are Boots putting their trusted name on pills that are labelled as a medicinal product, but contain nothing other than sugar? They’ve come out and said that there is no evidence to suggest that homeopathic remedies are efficacious but they will sell them if people believe they work.

Homeopathy is actually based on 18th century wishful thinking that water will somehow remember substances that it had previous contact with (but will forget the countless effluent that it has passed through). That a 10 billion year old water molecule will remember everything it has touched flies in the face of all known science and is an insult to any thinking person. Sincere people with medical needs buy homeopathic remedies only because they masquerade as being something more than mere sugar pills.

They are an insult to the herbal remedies on the shelf next to them at Boots; at least snake-oil has the decency to contain some snake.

Without question, the ongoing sale of homeopathy in pharmacies is causing a public relations disaster for UK pharmacists.  Bloggers are taking great delight in documenting how pharmacists that sell these products refuse to admit the products have no active ingredients, or happily sell the products without understanding what homeopathy is. The protest has become viral: It has spread to Australia, too (Here’s the video from the 10:23 overdose in Sydney, which takes place outside a pharmacy.)

It’s time for pharmacists everywhere to act in the best interest of patients, and pull all homeopathic remedies off pharmacy shelves.

Filed under: commentary Tagged: #ten23, homeopathy

New UK Campaign: “Homeopathy: There’s nothing in it”

A few weeks ago I blogged about some very public criticism of pharmacy practice in the United Kingdom. I noted that pharmacies were being publicly criticized for selling homeopathy, and this was causing a public relations disaster for Boots, one of the UK’s leading pharmacy chains, and a proud vendor of homeopathy.  The mockery of Boots has continued. And there’s now a new public campaign to raise awareness of the fact that homeopathy is an elaborate placebo system, and has no place in pharmacies.

Cleverly (but somewhat confusingly) called “10:23″  (Remember what that number means?) the campaign has the following goals:

The 10:23 campaign aims to raise awareness of the reality of homeopathy – how it can be proven not to work, how it can be shown to be impossible, and why it’s important to give patients the right information to allow them to make an informed decision on their healthcare.

The campaign starts in a few weeks – and they’ve already posted their open letter to Boots - here’s an excerpt:

We call upon Boots to withdraw all homeopathic products from your shelves. You should not be involved in the sale of ineffective products, because your customers trust you to do what is right for their health. Surely you agree that your commitment to excellent patient care is better served by supplying only those products whose claims can be substantiated by rigorous scientific research? Or do you really believe that Boots should be in the business of selling placebos to the sick and the injured?

The support lent by Boots to this quack therapy contributes directly to its acceptance as a valid medical treatment by the British public, acceptance it does not warrant and support it does not deserve. Please do the right thing, and remove this bogus therapy from your shelves.

If you’re interested in the campaign, you can sign up and find out more.  And follow the chatter on Twitter.  I suspect the PR problems for homeopathy-selling pharmacies may be just beginning.

Posted in announcements Tagged: #ten23, homeopathy