UK's BMA Has Had Enough

The British Medical Association delegates are expected to pass new regulations denying financial support to Homeopathic treatments. This would mean no more public funding and no more doctor support, at least in an official capacity, including apparently not requiring (allowing?) junior doctors to work at homeopathic hospitals. This would be a major and long overdue blow to what amounts to unproven and useless remedies. There is a fine line between medicine not accepted by traditional doctors and a scam meant simply to take money from trusting victims. The BMA want's to remove their support from those alternative medicines which do not have any evidence to back them up. This is all of homeopathy.

Of course the BHA (British Homeopathic Association) claims that this is unfair and that it would be denying legitimate care to thousands of people who suffer medical problems that evidence-based medicine has not answer for. They do not provide any proof of this, but they are emphatic in their claim, as if that is all that should be required.

There are plenty out there who believe in homeopathy, take their "drugs" and swear by it. These people have obviously had some experience that has convinced them it does work, but even they haven't anything but their own experience to relate, many times not even a convincing argument that they have been "cured" or otherwise helped by these drugs. It is difficult to be kind to a multi-billion dollar industry that has sprung up around the dispensing of water and sugar pills as if they were live-saving or at least live enhancing medicines, demanding to have them considered just as useful as traditional medicine, yet fail to provide any evidence supporting their claims. Whatever silly thing people wish to try out to cure whatever they have should be allowed, however tragic, but trying to pass it off as real medicine is dishonest at best.

Hopefully, if the BMA manages not to get tangled in court battles they will consider doing the same thing over here in the United States. There is still a lot of quackery masquerading as real medicine out there besides homeopathy, but we have to start somewhere. It is amazing that fraud is not permitted in this country, but peddling something as medicine and receiving money for it with no proof that it does any of the things claimed is considered "alternate medicine" and is perfectly fine. That would seem to be the very definition of fraud.