NHS bans homoeopathic treatments

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is to ban homoeopathic medications entirely stating the alternative “medicines” have no credible scientific evidence to support their continued use and are a “misuse of public funds”.

Since 2017, official NHS England guidelines have advised against prescribing the treatments which it warns are “at best a placebo”, but the new steps come after those warnings were ignored and homoeopathic remedies were still recommended 3,300 times.

Emeritus Professor and former chair of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter Edzard Ernst said: “Homoeopathy is based on 200-year-old misunderstandings about nature, physiology, and therapeutics. Its assumptions fly in the face of science.

“It was high time for the NHS to stop reimbursing this obsolete nonsense. Homoeopathy makes a mockery of evidence-based medicine.”

According to Insight Survey, the Vitamins and Supplements market, under which homoeopathic medications are categorised, in South Africa has increased from R2.9 billion in 2014 to R3.8 billion in 2016 and “has grown by a whopping compound annual growth rate of 13.5%. This is in comparison to the measly South African annual GDP growth rate of just 1%-2% over the same period”.

This growth may, however, be dampened by recent regulatory changes that “propose stricter procedures for registering over-the-counter ‘complementary medicines’ like those required for prescription pharmaceutical drugs”.

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