The Guardian view on homeopathy: the NHS shouldn’t pay | Editorial
by Editorial from on (#TP28)
Placebos can work magic. But that's no argument for the health service to privilege a form of mock medicine that defies science and common sense
Western medicine doesn't know it all. There are treatments that don't work at all well, others that work for reasons that nobody can fathom, and all sorts of others again that are still to be discovered. It is also true - as western medicine itself has firmly established - that the sugar pill can sometimes be a wonder drug. The administration of anything with the form of a treatment can do real good, and remarkably this applies even where the patient knows that "treatment" is nothing but a placebo. Administering placebos with extra ritual appears to redouble the effect, and so it would be no surprise, either, if a spoonful of mumbo-jumbo helped the medicine go down.
Related: Homeopathy on prescription could be banned from NHS
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