Public funding of homeopathy

Some people take the position that public money should not be spent on homeopathy because “it is a waste of tax-payers’ money”. Yet, very few people have access to the facts needed to weigh up this argument effectively.

Taking the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) as an example,

• In 2016, just £92,412 was spent on 40,000 homeopathy prescriptions from a total expenditure of £9.2 billion.¹
• Out of the total NHS budget of £100 billion a year, roughly £4 million (0.004%) was spent annually on Homeopathy² if you include everything from running the hospitals departments to paying the doctors.
• Five ‘observational studies’ tracked the outcome of patients being treated at NHS homeopathic hospitals. These studies consistently show that patients improve clinically following homeopathic treatment (often from chronic, difficult to treat conditions); some also highlight areas of potential economic benefit for the NHS as a whole in terms of reduced prescribing of conventional drugs (see below).

When considering value for money, it should also be remembered that if homeopathy patients were not treated with this service, they would have had to be offered other treatment options (if available), carrying their own associated costs.

Homeopathy should be considered in the same way as other NHS treatments

Some people argue that the NHS should not pay for homeopathy because we do not know that it works, whereas conventional medical drugs are ‘tried and tested’. Surprisingly this issue isn’t actually as clear-cut as one might think.

Analysis by the British Medical Journal’s (BMJ) Clinical Evidence³ shows that just 11% of 3,000 commonly used NHS treatments are known to be beneficial:

This data clearly indicates that the NHS pays for many treatments – besides homeopathy – for which the evidence is still unclear.

What evidence is there that homeopathy helps NHS patients?

The largest observational study at Bristol Homeopathic Hospital followed over 6,500 consecutive patients with over 23,000 attendances in a six-year period⁴. 70% of follow-up patients reported improved health; 50% reported major improvement.
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The results of this 2005 Bristol study have been confirmed by a more recent observational study, published in 2016, involving an audit of just under 200 patients. The audit demonstrated that patients with long-term conditions who come under homeopathic care experience statistically significant improvements in their presenting symptoms and wellbeing.⁵ 
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A 500-patient survey at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital showed that many patients were able to reduce or stop conventional medication following homeopathic treatment.⁶
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When assessing these clinical results, it is important to remember that NHS patients were usually referred for homeopathy because conventional medicine had failed to give satisfactory results, or conventional treatment was contra-indicated in their case. In 2016, NHS funding of homeopathy was stopped on the basis that it would save the NHS money. One has to ask, now that these homeopathy services are not available, who will treat these 1000s of patients instead? This raises serious ethical concerns about the removal of a service valued by patients, without provision of viable alternative treatments.

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