Homeopathy on the NHS comes to an end in London

News from the Good Thinking newsletter:

Last week, the BBC covered the latest development in our campaign to stop NHS homeopathy, revealing that the Royal London Hospital for Integrative Medicine will no longer be allowed to offer homeopathy consultations to NHS patients, effectively ending NHS support for homeopathy in the capital…

The decision to end NHS homeopathy at the facility is no surprise to us – we have been tracking spending on homeopathy in the area since 2014, when we were told by 17 London CCGs [Clinical Commissioning Groups] that they had no way of knowing how much of their funding was being spent on homeopathy…

Partly as a result of our encouragement, in April 2017 NHS Camden CCG undertook an audit of 100 of their patients at the Royal London Hospital for Integrative Medicine. The audit found significant non-compliance with their policy on complementary medicine, with 41 out of the 41 homeopathy treatments tracked by the audit breaching the policy.

As a result of the audit, the CCG reiterated that the RLHIM was not to treat any NHS patients with homeopathy – bringing to an end the homeopathy service at the facility, and across London as a whole.

The end of homeopathy in London is a major milestone in our campaign to stop NHS homeopathy.

I wonder what David Tredinnick will make of this.

All of which is a good prompt to mention once more the homeopathic web comic.

Ben Goldacre, he of the excellent Bad Science, is good on why some people believe in homeopathy despite the science being stacked up against it.