THE SUN (…yes, I know! …) reported last Sunday that figures from 20 trusts show they forked out for questionable treatments for more than 3,000 patients. Treatments also including acupuncture and aromatherapy cost a total of £269,000. If the figure is applied across all 120-plus trusts the true cost could be well over £1.5 million. Hull University Teaching Hospitals spent the most, at £170,000.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance, which did the analysis, said: “With long waiting lists, quack remedies cannot be allowed to divert precious resources.” Alternative medicine expert Dr Edzard Ernst said: “The NHS often uses complementary medicine rarely based on good evidence but on lobbying of proponents of quackery.”
End of quote
Whenever I am asked by journalists to provide a critical comment on so-called alternative medicine (SCAM), I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I find it important to get a rational message out, particularly into certain papers. On the other hand, I dread what they might do with my comment, particularly certain papers. If I had £5 for every time I have been misquoted, I could probably buy a decent second-hand car! This is why I nowadays tend to give my comments in writing via e-mail.
To my relief, THE SUN quoted me (almost) correctly. Almost correctly, but not fully! Here is the question I was asked to respond to: NHS statistics show the health service spending more than £250,000 on complementary and alternative medicines last year. Do you think this is a sensible use of NHS funding? Are the benefits well proven enough to spend taxpayer money on these therapies?
And here is my attempt to respond in a concise way that SUN readers might still understand:
Complementary medicine is an umbrella term for more than 400 treatments and diagnostic techniques. Some of them work but many don’t; some are safe but many are not. If the NHS would spend £250000 – a tiny amount considering the overall expenditure in the NHS – on those few that do generate more good than harm, all might be fine. The problem, I think, is that the NHS currently uses complementary medicine rarely based on good evidence but often based on the lobbying of influential proponents of quackery.
As you see, it is good to deal with requests from journalists in writing!
5 Responses to NHS hospitals spent a fortune on “quack” therapies such as reiki and foot massages last year
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Evidently SMB doesn’t have a better treatment. News of successful treatments travels fast among the sick and diseased.
@RG
And misinformation and lies promoting useless quack treatments travel even faster.
Anyone with two brain cells knows that SBM can’t treat everything under the sun. Evidently, RG has only one. Cue RG criticizing SBM for not having an effective treatment for death.
On a different note, who dug up this dessicated corpse of a moniker RG from the crypt?
Correction: News of supposedly successful treatments travels fast among the sick and diseased.
In the vast majority of cases, these reports turn out to be false, as we saw with Ivermectin, for example, which was supposed to help against Corona.
The worst aspect of CAM in the NHS is that it induces a sense amongst many health care workers that Camistry does provide worthwhile benefits, their sense of responsibility to practice SBM ethically is diminished – and that has an effect on all other aspects of the care they offer.
And on the training they give other professionals.
Sigh.
We know SBM does not (yet) ‘have all the answers’, but it fails on this score for rational and ethically based reasons.
And tries to get the evidence!
Camistry, condimentary medicine, SCAMs only tries to show their preferred methodologies have a value (beyond the placebo).
And when an eminent professor tried to actually obtain evidence of the benefit of CAM, look what happened to him.
His then colleague Dr Michael Dixon rose to be head of the Royal Medical Household – though I believe he has not gone down under with HRH.
More sighs.