Dogma all the same
I just watched Richard Dwarkin’s Enemies of Reason on Channel 4. I’ve wanted to write for a while about the group of doctors and scientists who are trying to stop the NHS from funding homeopathy and especially the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital. The Hospital was recently refurbished as Dwarkin showed in the programme, partly with NHS support – it is now a beautiful space, wooden floors and all – other hospitals could learn a lot.
The campaign to stop funding is a serious one with many Trusts either stopping or cutting support. The Hospital has already lost four floors of it’s building to Great Ormond Street Hospital, permanently changing the atmosphere within the building from what was an amazing sanctuary of calm in the middle of London, into a ’stressed’ environment of any other hospital and I can only think that greedily, they would like the rest of this now beautifully refurbished building, that has been a homeopathic hospital for over 100 years.
In fact it’s interesting that a number of the doctors who oppose the funding, work within the same trust as the Hospital (University College London Hospitals). The Hospital joined the trust in 2002, and although ‘the merger was supposed to enable closer collaboration between complementary therapies and conventional medicine’, it has taken just five years to shrink it to a fraction of it’s former size and leave it facing permanent closure.
Dwarkin gave a quote that anyone who said they could understand quantum physics probably didn’t understand it –but for homeopathy it can only be legitimate if we can totally understand it. It’s strange then that so many of his peers seem to think otherwise (all those practising at the Hospital are trained doctors) and a real shame that this group is so actively giving NHS funding bodies an excuse to stop funding this amazing place which helps thousands of people every year – people who have often found little help from ’scientific medicine’ – placebo or not, if it works and it does, surely that’s a good thing? If as he says we spend £1.6 billion a year on ‘alternative’ remedies, perhaps we do not mind and even support that the NHS helps to fund some of them.
