Health chiefs rebrand ‘centre for witchcraft’

Tom Foot has written – poorly – a factually incorrect article which follows the now recognised pattern of malign ignorance and ‘junk journalism’ one has come to expect from those purporting to report on homeopathy.

First, if Foot had bothered to thoroughly investigate the circumstances surrounding the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital’s name change, he might have realised this is an issue whose provenance long pre-dates the accusation by so-called ‘leading doctors’ that homeopathy is ‘witchcraft’. Contrary to what he implies, there is no causal relationship between the two.

The name change fully reflects the Hospital’s continued commitment to its integrated approach to medicine that includes homeopathy along with many other complementary and alternative therapies. These are areas at which the Hospital excels, making it one of the country’s chief standard bearers for these therapies within the NHS. To suggest, as Foot does, that the Hospital’s association with homeopathy has been severed is as absurd as it is mischievous.

Also, since when did a highly vocal minority of young relatively inexperienced physicians who, earlier this year managed to hijack a session of the recent BMA Conference, constitute ‘leading doctors’? Foot’s hyperbole here is worthy of a first year media studies student.

Next, the so-called ‘criticism from the medical establishment’ was in fact the advice contained in a report published earlier this year by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which is made up of MPs only a few of whom are doctors. Again, Foot demonstrates the paucity of his research. For during the hearings of this Committee, the vast majority were absent, the main witness cross-examination was conducted in a well-documented disreputable fashion by the thankfully now-ex Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris, and it was the Committee’s biased rump that wrote and published this report.

Oh yes, the new government has politely rejected this Committee’s advice on stopping funding for homeopathy on the NHS. Perhaps Foot was on holiday when the announcement was made because his comment about ‘mounting speculation that homeopathic treatments will be among the first cuts to the NHS’ is out of date and unsubstantiated tittle-tattle. Indeed, Foot even seems to have been deaf to the howls of dismay and teeth gnashing by homeopathy’s detractors that greeted the government’s recent announcement.

Perhaps Foot’s editors might care to deploy his ‘talents’ elsewhere, e.g., reporting on how little evidence there is for current conventional medical procedures (more than half of which turn out to be of unknown effectiveness, according to the British Medical Journal); how many people are harmed within the NHS (2.68 million people in 2006 according to a government report), and the extent of fraud and deception in biomedical research that would foist on the public drugs with potentially dangerous side-effects (according to the influential science journal Nature). Certainly he would be advised to steer well clear of homeopathy and the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, subjects he obviously knows nothing about.

Dr Lionel R Milgrom

Cricklewood, London.