What does the NHS establishment fear about homeopathy? Why should anyone, purporting to have patient welfare at heart, fear a system of medicine that has been bringing massive patient satisfaction for more than 200 years?

Might it be that homeopathy is the mirror that tells the ghastly truth first thing in the morning? Is it the window on the uncomfortable reality of the modern medical health care system (I would not have chosen those words to describe a system which appears to enshrine ill health) in the UK?

Quite why our present times have brought an unprecedented and systematic attack on a system of medicine that has lived peacefully alongside, with the single ambition of helping patients, is a total mystery to me.

Whatever, medical and veterinary homeopaths go about their daily business of delivering real health care.

This from 1998:

http://www.the7thfire.com/health_and_nutrition/Prescription_drugs_deaths.htm

"Study confirms how dangerous prescription drugs are:
Drug side effects make 2 million sick
Properly prescribed medicine kills 106,000 each year

Drugs that cause worst reactions: heart medications. blood thinners and chemotherapeutic agents for cancer. Most common cause of death: liver or kidney failure, heart rhythm problems and bone marrow destruction.

More than 2 million Americans become seriously ill every year because of toxic reactions to correctly prescribed medicines taken properly and 106,000 die from those reactions, a new study concludes. That surprisingly high number makes drug side effects at least the sixth and perhaps even the fourth, most common cause of death in this country. The analysis, the largest and most complete of its kind, suggests that one in 15 hospital patients in the United States can expect a serious reaction to prescription or over-the-counter medicine and about 5 percent of those will die from it.

If the findings are accurate, then the number of people dying each year from drug side effects may be exceeded only by the numbers of people dying from heart disease, cancer and stroke and may be greater than the number dying from lung disease, pneumonia or diabetes. Experts said the study, which appears in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is stronger than previous ones because it looks only at cases in which drugs were taken correctly. Previous hints of similarly high side effect rates had been attributed in large part to people getting the wrong medicines or taking them in the wrong doses.

Only one quarter of the reactions were due to patients being allergic to the drug in question. In theory, those reactions could be avoided by more carefully asking patients about known allergies. The rest of the side effects were classified as essentially inevitable, bound to affect a certain percentage of the population for unknown reasons.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers, drug regulators and the researchers themselves warned against over-reacting to the numbers, noting that the study made no effort to measure the benefits of the same medicines-an equally important part of the cost-benefit calculation that determines the usefulness of a drug."

Can you imagine the comfort a dying patient would feel, from the knowledge that someone thinks others have benefited from the same drug?

Let's face the facts. When profit is the motive, common sense, science, reason, safety, ethics and decency tend to take flight.

The NHS, which can hardly keep its head above the financial surface, partly because of spiralling drug costs, currently appears to be hell-bent on putting homeopathy behind it, once and for all. Never mind reason. Never mind logic. If the punter doesn't fight for the freedom of choice, it could be flushed down the toilet of vested interest. Homeopathy would then be the prerogative of those who can afford private treatment.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005 by: Jessica Fraser

Here's the evidence base:

"Prescription drug deaths double in a decade

Deaths from adverse reactions to prescription drugs have more than doubled in 10 years, new figures show. Statistics from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) reveal 973 people died from suspected serious side-effects last year, compared to 382 in 1996. The MHRA figures also show there were 9,801 cases between May and December last year of patients having a serious, suspected adverse reaction to the drugs they were prescribed."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/22/nhs222.xml

These are only the recorded cases! In the U.S., the situation is also desperate.

Another estimate:

"Prescription drugs linked to 15,000 deaths each year

By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor

DRUGS prescribed to patients for a range of conditions may be responsible for as many as 1,200 sudden deaths a year in Britain. Antibiotics, antipsychotic drugs and those used to treat nausea and vomiting may all be involved because they have the ability to interfere with the electrical activity that controls the heartbeat.

The alarm was sounded by a study in the Netherlands that found that patients taking these drugs had nearly three times the risk of sudden cardiac death. The authors estimate that the drugs cause 320 deaths a year in the Netherlands. By extrapolation, that equates to 1,200 deaths a year in Britain and 15,000 deaths in Europe and the US as a whole.

The Dutch study, published in European Heart Journal, looked at all deaths between 1995 and 2003 in a population of half a million people from 150 general practices nationally for whom complete medical records are kept. "

The vociferous and powerful minority lobby that wants to ban homeopathy should perhaps turn its energy and attentions to rather more urgent matters. In their saner moments, they might concede that homeopathy cannot ever wreak such havoc and mayhem. They might even open their minds to the massive scale of positive outcomes after homeopathic treament. There again, we live in a far-from-perfect world.