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Adopt a homeopath

Next week (14-21 June 2008) is homeopathy awareness week in the UK, hopefully other nations are spared. The theme is Homeopathy for Allergies. Sadly, this raising of awareness includes attempts to place homeopaths in pharmacies.

For the eighth awareness week, The Society has again teamed up with Nelsons to highlight the benefits of homeopathy in allergic conditions.

Marketing Manager Pamela Stevens has been busy liaising with high street chemists and health stores who want to be part of the event by hosting a homeopath for a day, and with homeopaths who want to be placed.

For many years my own profession has been attempting to define itself as the “scientist in the highstreet”. As a colleague and friend of mine wrote, six years ago, in The Pharmaceutical Journal:

Attempting to adopt the position of the scientist in the high street while promoting such quackery is indefensible. Promoting these spurious treatments strips us of our credibility in the eyes of patients and fellow professionals alike. We cannot hope to be treated as equals by other health professionals so long as we assert on the one hand that evidence is paramount, while using the other hand to stuff our tills with the proceeds of therapies that have no basis in scientific fact.

Matters have not improved.

Comments closed — Trackbacks closed RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2008, at 11:59 am by Anthony. Filed in EBM, Quackery, pharmacists.

3 Comments

  1. dvnutrix

    In some US supermarkets, they experimented with shelf-edges that triggered spoken messages as you went by. Maybe conflicted pharmacists might introduce a similar scheme?

    They don’t work. They have no plausible mechanism of action and trial after trial shows that they work no better than placebo. As a scientist I have to tell you that. As somebody who wishes to make a living, I’m going to be faux-libertarian and say that the market rules, I’ve given you the facts, and it’s your money. We are the Dr Nick Riviera of the pharmaceutical industry and have much to gain from consumerist-driven medication.
    I’m not your mother. It is your money and you should spend it as you wish. However, please don’t use homeopathic remedies on your child if you suspect anything other than a self-limiting condition.

    Needs a bit of work. Perhpas it might be set to music and played over the PA system in a pharmacy within a supermarket.

    Posted on 11-Jun-08 at 12:34 pm | Permalink
  2. Colin

    Just a thought…

    Using the homeopathic principle that the greater the dilution the stonger the effect, shouldn’t the Society be promoting a total absence of homeopaths?

    That should be a stronger marketing effect than a whole group of them?

    Puzzled.

    Posted on 12-Jun-08 at 10:52 am | Permalink
  3. mike stanton

    Didn’t somebody on Bad Science once very wittily describe using the memory of money to pay for homeopathic remedies?

    Posted on 12-Jun-08 at 10:40 pm | Permalink