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Published: Tuesday, 15 August 2017 07:38

Written by News Editor

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Campaigners have warned that some GPs and other NHS doctors are undermining a policy to stop homeopathic treatments. NHS England has announced a ban on commissioning them, yet in London and the South West family doctors continue to prescribe them, and some NHS hospitals deliver them, costing up to £6 million a year, it has been reported.

Resistance to official policy is being bolstered by a network of doctors who support homoeopathy within the NHS, as well as an attachment to homoeopathy among many patients, according to the Good Thinking Society. They are hoping a public consultation in Bristol, about the funding of alternative therapies will mark the beginning of the end of homoeopathic treatments in the NHS. There are just two significant areas of the country where the NHS funds the practice.

A second consultation is taking place in London, led by Enfield CCG, to gain support for abandoning all funding for homoeopathy. However, it is expected that both the London and Bristol engagement exercises will prompt “disproportionately strong” support from patients in favour of alternative treatments.

Michael Marshall, project director at the Good Thinking Society, said audits had shown the Royal Hospital of Integrated Medicine, an NHS facility in Great Ormond Street, was routinely using money from local GP groups on homoeopathic remedies. “There is no good evidence that homoeopathy works,” he said. “The NHS should not be funding treatments which have been proven not to work as every penny that is spent could be better spent elsewhere.” Last month Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, described homoeopathy as a “placebo at best”, and a “misuse” of scarce NHS funds.

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