Homeopathy in Britain

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3
As lawmakers in the United States determine how or if proceed with healthcare reform, consider the health debate flourishing in Britain. There lawmakers have determined that homeopathy, a form of alternative medicine, is not medicine of any kind at all (beyond a placebo.) Britain funds four homeopathic hospitals in the UK, spending about six million dollars per year. The lawmakers say enough’s enough. But as The World’s Alex Gallafent reports, a back and forth over homeopathy is nothing new.

• Parliamentary enquiry into homeopathy
• An array of responses to the enquiry, collated by the BBC
• Britain’s Faculty of Homeopathy
• Hpathy portal

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Britain’s state run health care system pays for some forms of alternative medicine; that includes homeopathy.  But this week a Parliamentary panel issued an unequivocal recommendation regarding homeopathy.  The panel said the British government should stop funding homeopathic treatments because they don’t work.  Here’s more from The World’s Alex Gallafent.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  We’ve heard this debate before.

DAVID COLGUHOUN:  It’s an open and shut question.  We’ve been going on 200 years now, there’s nothing in the pills, it’s very, very simple.

GALLAFENT: That’s a pharmacologist, Professor David Cahoon and here’s a homeopath, Dr. Sara Eames.

SARA EAMES:  One person thinks one thing, one person thinks another thing.  I see homeopathy helping patients every day.

GALLAFENT: Indeed this has pretty much been the back and forth since Samuel Hahnemann devised homeopathy back in the late 1790′s.  The German physician rooted his theory in a handful of basic propositions, including a couple that have stuck all the way up to the present day.  Number one – or translated from the Latin, like cures like.  The idea is that whatever might produce your symptoms, will also cure those same symptoms.  So if your eyes are streaming thanks to an allergy, onions might be a cure.  Unlike an inoculation, in which an agent related to an actual disease is placed inside the body to reproduce, homeopathy relies only on something that produces similar symptoms to the disease.  Here’s another of Hahnemann’s propositions.  “Dilution, dilution, dilution.”  The cure is diluted in water, one part to 100.  Then the resulting mixture is diluted again, the same way.  And then again, and again, 30 times over or more to make dry medicine you simply drip a bit of that diluted water onto a sugar pill.  It all gets a bit silly says Australian mathematician and skeptic Matt Parker.

MATT PARKER:  So after all these dilutions, they end up with one part active ingredient and so the pills I bought to have a go at all this were Arnica pills.

GALLAFENT: Arnica is a perennial herb that homeopaths use for pain relief.

PARKER:  And there was one part Arnica for every million, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, parts pill.  So the numbers are just mind bogglingly huge.

GALLAFENT: The British comedians Mitchell and Webb played with these ideas in a skit set in a kind of homeopathic emergency room.

MALE VOICE 1:  Okay, he’s stabilizing.  Now, does anybody know what sort of car hit him?

FEMALE VOICE 1:  Blue Ford Mondeo apparently.

MALE VOICE 1:  Right, get met a bit of Blue Ford Mondeo, put it in water, shake it, dilute it, shake it again, dilute it again, do some more shaking, dilute it some more and then put three drops on his tongue.  If that doesn’t cure him, I don’t know what will.

GALLAFENT: Ha, ha, very funny, say the homeopaths.  Countering that even if there’s nothing left of the original substance, water can retain a memory of any given active ingredient.  Now rather than offering up a present day critique of this notion, let’s turn instead to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.  During a lecture delivered in Boston in 1842, the physician and author asked this:

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES:  Is there not in this as great an exception to all the hitherto received laws of nature as in the miracle of the loaves and fishes?

GALLAFENT: It’s true, homeopathy does require a significant leap of faith.  Still, those British lawmakers did acknowledge in their report this week that homeopathy does make some patients feel better.  Sara Eames argues it’s good for Britain’s National Health Service too.  She’s President of the Faculty of Homeopathy which regulates the practice in the U.K.

EAMES:  By combining homeopathy and other complementary therapies, together with conventional medicine, actually you can save the NHS an awful lot of money.  Statistics don’t have the answer to everything.

GALLAFENT: But those lawmakers also said that any improvement in health is driven by belief, not science.  That’s what Columbia University medical historian Barron Lerner told me in an email message too.  He notes that homeopathy has a lot of emotional appeal for some people and that they may become convinced after treatment that it was the homeopathy that healed them and they may have just gotten better anyway.  The British government says it’s reluctant to get involved in all this noting that there are strong feelings on both side.  No such diplomacy from Oliver Wendell Holmes, to whom I leave the final words.

HOLMES:  I will not meddle with this excrescence.  Time is too precious and the harvest of living extravagances nods too heavily to my sickle that I should blunt it upon straw and stubble.

GALLAFENT: In other words, can’t we talk about something else now?  Evolution anyone?  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.