Successes

Published: 8 July, 2010

• FAR from being a centre of superstition , the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital has a proud record of applying science to medicine for 150 years.

In 1854 the rest of London’s hospitals were watching 46 to 61 people out of every 100 in their wards die from cholera, a figure one would still expect to see after no treatment at all today.

At the same time only 18 to 33 patients out of 100 died at the homeopathic hospital, a result which could only be achieved by a successful treatment.

Hardly surprisingly doctors of the time tried to suppress this information.

Today some doctors in the BMA are still trying to suppress the inconvenient facts.

When they say there is no evidence, for example, they ignore a study of 6,500 patients at the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital which showed that more than 70 out of 100 saw clinical improvement from homeopathic treatment.

The success of homeopathy in the NHS is achieved under the greatest of handicaps.

Best used at the earliest point in a developing illness, it is almost always used in the NHS as a last resort.

They even have a nickname which says it all: TEETH (tried everything else, try homeopathy)’.

Opponents of the RLHH should remember that the hospital was built from the subscriptions of homeopaths and their grateful patients, and then given to the NHS in 1948 to provide homeopathic treatment.

If some BMA doctors do not want it, they should have the integrity to insist that it be to give it back to those who do.
WILLIAM ANDERSON
Chair, Homeopathy: Medicine for the 21st Century