Michelle’s blog has been a long time coming – but it is here at last! Apologies to all of you who have been logging in since April when I first promised that it was on its way! I hope that you have found enough to keep you busy on the main foodsmatter.com site, in our busy forums and on our Facebook and Twitter pages…
One of the reasons I was keen to start a blog was that, in the days of the Foods Matter magazine, many of our subscribers felt that they had a very personal relationship with us which had been lost when we went totally digital, a relationship with we valued, and were as loathe to lose, as they were. Hopefully, my new blog will re-establish that connection and allow you to ‘talk to us’ whenever you feel so inclined – as well as allowing me to sound off on topics on which I may feel strongly but are not always suitable for the main site – such as….
What a shame the BMA (British Medical Association) feels so threatened by homeopathic remedies which they claim to be no more than sugar pills – and therefore, by definition, harmless. A lot more than can be said for an alarming number of prescription drugs which are handed out, wholesale, by BMA members.
At the BMA conference in Brighton which ran over the last three days, no less than seven motions were moved against homeopathy including motions that remedies should be labelled as placebos and that NHS funding for homeopathic remedies, hospitals and training should be discontinued.
According to Dr Sara Eames, President of the Faculty of Homeopathy, homeopathic medicines make up 0.001% of the NHS drugs budget while doctors throughout the UK provide approximately 60,000 patients with homeopathic care through the NHS without which care these patients would be referred to more expensive specialists and be prescribed more costly conventional medicine.
All other considerations aside, with funding at a premium in these straightened times, surely patients would be better served by the BMA concentrating their conference time on measures which might save just a little more than 0.001% of the NHS’s annual budget!
Timely comments, particularly when we discover that that the NHS has 20 million unused doses of swine flu vaccine on its shelves. There are a very large number of people out there who swear by homeopathy and have benefited hugely from homeopathic remedies and the care of homeopathic doctors. Its absolutely clear that homeopathic remedies don’t do well in double blind placebo controlled trials, but that is because they work in a very different way. Actually there are quite a lot of allopathic remedies which don’t do well in those trials either – to say nothing of the side effects – but thats another story.
Homeopathy is often very helpful in treating diabetes, particularly in cats with transient diabetes. Natural Remedies