Don’t call believers in homeopathy idiots – it will push them further from science | Greg Dash

Those attacking Jeremy Corbyn for supporting the NHS provision of homeopathy are helping to entrench the perceived elitism of mainstream medicine

This week, critics of Jeremy Corbyn dug up a 2010 tweet in which he justified his signing of a parliamentary motion in favour of NHS provision of homeopathic treatments (his voting record, including votes in favour of scientific funding and against the use of the designation of "doctor" for complementary therapists is available here).

Although I am not a proponent of homeopathy, the response to this "revelation" has been discouraging. In particular, Ian Dunt of politics.co.uk used belief in homeopathy as a test not only for idiocy, but also for morality. Dunt suggests that in holding a belief in homeopathy (or any other "enemy of objective truth"), proponents are showing that they fail to understand the world and rejecting objectivity in favour of experiential evidence or intuition.

Continue reading...