You are probably now aware that homeopathy is undergoing yet more criticism form the Bad Science lobby and various non-medically trained journalists.
Please help by writing to your MP (it’s ever so easy) and asking him/her to sign an early day motion. I have copied the letter I have sent to Michael Spicer, my MP, at the bottom of this article. Please use it and edit it as appropriate to write to your own MP or Spicer if he is your MP.
There has been a terrible miscarriage of justice here, and as patients we can expose this to our MPs.
Now is the time to act. David Tredinnick who has put forward the EDM has spoken several times in favour of homeopathy & complimentary therapy.
Click here to see if your MP has already signed EDM 908
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=40517&SESSION=903
Click here to ask your MP to sign EDM 908
Please feel free to use this letter.
Dear MP,
Following the Science and Technology committee’s Homeopathy evidence check, I am writing to ask you to sign the early day motion 908, which expresses concern at the conclusions of the Science & Technology Committee’s Report; notes that the Committee only took oral evidence from a limited number of witnesses; regrets that the Committee ignored the 74 randomised controlled trials comparing homeopathy with placebo, of which 63 showed homeopathic treatments were effective and calls on the government to maintain its policy of allowing decision-making on individual clinical interventions, including homeopathy, to remain in the hands of local NHS service providers and practitioners who are best placed to know their community’s needs.
I am concerned that those giving oral evidence included a journalist who was investigated by the Press Complaints Commission for his previous and unsubstantiated comments about homeopaths; a charity that has long publicly opposed homeopathy along with one of its key funders and a PCT that had already decommissioned homeopathy as one of its services.
Notable by their absence were any patient representatives who had used homeopathy or a PCT currently commissioning homeopathy.
In summarising that there is no evidence for homeopathy, the committee inexplicably overlooked the fact that, by the end of 2009, there were 74 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of homeopathy published in peer-reviewed journals which describe statistically significant results, from which firm conclusions can be drawn. Of these RCTs comparing homeopathy either with placebo or established conventional treatments, 63 were positive for homeopathy and 11 were negative.
In its press release, the Committee advised the government that “prescribing pure placebos is bad medicine’. Clearly, it was not aware that a 2008 meta-analysis involving 35 clinical trials and 5,000 patients suffering from depression found that commonly prescribed antidepressants have little more effect than ‘dummy’ placebo pills. And yet, prescriptions for anti-depressants are at record levels, with 31 million written in 2006 at a cost to the NHS of almost £300million.
To put this in context, the NHS spends £11 billion on its annual drugs budget. Of that, the annual bill for homeopathic remedies is £152,000.
As a patient of homeopathy in your constituency, I sincerely hope you will make a stand against this so called hearing and sign the EDM.
http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=40517&SESSION=903
Yours sincerely,