We are so broke that special needs teachers are being cut, taxes are being raised and social welfare is being cut. But you – and all Irish taxpayers – are paying for magic. Abracadabra-alakazam there’s-nothing-up-my-sleeve style magic.
The conjuring trick in question is homeopathy. The VHI, the dominant insurer, has no truck with homeopathy, but newer insurers in the market use its touchy-feely image to recruit younger customers who are less likely to generate the expensive claims typical of the elderly.
Laya Healthcare (formerly Quinn) pay customers 75 per cent of the cost of visiting a homeopath (the same as they offer for GP visits). Aviva Health allows up to €200 a year to pay homeopaths; and HSF allows customers up to €1,300 per year for homeopathic ‘treatment’. The taxpayer is funding 20 per cent of all of these payments via the subsidy for health insurance payments.
The detachment of some homeopaths from reality is difficult to miss:
As a homeopath and astrologer, I have been fascinated by the homeopathic application of the planetary lights… The remedy was made by exposing powdered milk sugar to a powerful telescope … focused on the planet Saturn… the physical symptoms that appeared and the content of the discussion during the proving suggest that this remedy might be effective for accident-related trauma, bone and nerve damage.
Patients, encouraged by the colour schemes and vocabulary used on homeopaths’ websites, may confuse homeopathy with ‘traditional’ or ‘natural’ medicine. In fact, Samuel Hahnemann, a physician from Saxony created homeopathy in 1796. He thought he felt a stomach upset come on after he tested a plant remedy supposed to settle the stomach. From this, he concluded that all substances can have the reverse effect to that expected, and he advanced this idea to the notion that extremely diluted compounds would reverse their effect.
18th-century physician Samuel Hahnemann
Hahnemann promoted other crackpot medical theories, all devoid of evidence, but only one, homeopathy, outlived him, perhaps because of a coincidence. Also in 1796, Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine. Science shows that our immune system learns from the diseases it encounters (if we survive) so we typically only get many diseases once in our lifetime. Vaccination triggers the immune response in the human body with a dead, deactivated, very small, or slightly different dose of the pathogen. We get the immunity, without suffering – or dying of – the disease.
Jenner created the vaccine when he noticed that milkmaids who contracted the minor disease cowpox never suffered from the deadly, scarring smallpox. Vaccines have saved millions of lives. On 8 May 1980, the WHO declared smallpox eradicated.
There is no connection between homeopathy and vaccination, but it isn’t hard to see how, in the eighteenth century, confusion would arise between two medicines where a very small dose of ‘the disease’ gave protection from it. Homeopathy cured nothing but, along with prayer and magic, it was often safer than going to an eighteenth-century doctor who offered leeches, bloodletting and poisons like mercury.
Along with homeopathy, these fell into obscurity at the start of the twentieth century. Medicines could be tested methodically, and the placebo effect filtered out with double-blind testing, where neither doctor nor patient know if they are using the real drug or a sugar pill – vaccination worked, homeopathy didn’t.
In the 1970s, renewed interest in homeopathy coincided with a rise in the environmental movement. It’s message, often critical of ‘chemical’ and ‘artificial’ medicines from the pharmaceutical industry resonated strongly, and homeopaths cashed in. The industry has grown to taking US$2.9bn in revenues in the United States alone, according to the Irish Society of Homeopaths.
Homeopaths claim that the expensive pills that they sell contain an extreme dilution of compounds that cause the problem that they claim to cure; for example they say that caffeine is in homeopathic ‘sleeping pills’. However the ‘dilution’ is so vast, that to get a single molecule of caffeine, you would need to take a pill with a diameter of 150 million km – the distance from the Earth to the Sun. All the homeopathic ‘sleeping pills’ ever made contain far less caffeine than you would inhale walking past a coffee shop.
Fake sleeping pills may be harmless, but Jacqueline Alderslade, 55, an asthmatic from Co Mayo wasn’t so lucky. She went to a homeopath who persuaded her to give up conventional medicines because her symptoms ‘weren’t really asthma’, and replace them with a homeopathic ‘cures’. She suffered a severe asthma attack and died. Paul Howie, also from Mayo, was advised by the same homeopath that if he resorted to ‘conventional’ medicine for his neck problems, it would kill him. In fact, he was suffering from a treatable tumour, and the failure to seek treatment led directly to his death.
There have also been many deaths of people who refused or delayed getting real treatment because of their faith in a homeopath, in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere. BBC reporters approached homeopaths under cover saying they were preparing to travel to Africa. The homeopaths sold them useless pills to ‘fill the malaria-sized hole in your aura’ and omitted basic medical advice, such as sleeping in mosquito nets.
On seeing the report , Dr Ron Behrens of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said
“We’ve certainly had patients admitted to our unit with the malignant form of malaria who have been taking homeopathic remedies and without a doubt the reason that they were taking them and not effective drugs was the reason they had malaria.”
Many homeopaths operating in Ireland go to great lengths to convey an image of professionalism, displaying impressive-looking certificates and using medical jargon. Doctors aren’t perfect, and must often answer ‘I don’t know’. It is easy to see how vulnerable people are taken in by reassuring frauds who seem competent and promise a treatment for any ailment. The payouts for homeopaths – partly from the taxpayer – from health insurance contribute to this fraudulent image.
People, though entitled to spend their money on any nonsense they want, are also entitled to protection from those who would profit by risking their health or their lives.
- The government should immediately end the tax relief on any health insurance plan that makes payouts for magical-based cures.
- The civil liability laws should be changed so that any person or company who presents themselves as having medical or medical-like knowledge (through word or deed) should be exposed to full financial liability if their medicines or advice leads to an adverse outcome for their client.
