In the United Kingdom, attacks on homeopathy/CAM as non valid therapeutic procedures emanate mainly from individuals such as Edzard Ernst (oddly, the United Kingdom’s first professor of CAM at the University of Exeter), Oxford academic and author Richard Dawkins, pharmacologist David Colquhoun, and some emeritus medical professors and doctors (including oncologist Michael Baum, and gerontologist and philosopher Raymond Tallis) who recently wrote to the Times newspaper urging health authorities to stop supporting “unproven” therapies like homeopathy/ CAMs. As well as the recently formed organization, Sense About Science, they and those like them around the world, I call the “New Fundamentalists.” It is perhaps only fair to say at this point that not all scientists who value the essentially scientific principles behind EBM are “New Fundamentalists”; equally, not all those who defend homeopathy/CAMs do so within a spirit of scientific inquiry.
New Fundamentalists tend to represent themselves as the last bastions of reason, against a perceived tide of irrational belief in, among other things, “quack” medicines. Their certainty that all the evidence indicates homeopathy doesn’t work and, in fact, is positively deadly, leads them to ignore or condemn out of hand anything that contradicts their beliefs. And behind them, like some eminence gris, is the financial reach of the globalized pharmaceutical industry.
In the United Kingdom, the New Fundamentalists’ raison d’ĂȘtre is to ensure the total exclusion from the National Health Service of all what they consider to be “quack” therapies, and to bring about the closure of the five state-funded homeopathic hospitals, regardless of the many who have and continue to benefit from them. Subsequently, there have indeed been reductions in NHS referrals to homeopathy, and the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital in the United Kingdom, is currently under threat of closure.
Though no more than a clash of paradigms, and in the history of science nothing new, what marks the present attacks on homeopathy/CAMs as different is that we now live in an age of easily accessible mass communication. And the New Fundamentalists are helped in propagating their “quack-busting” message by many in the media, some of whom share their beliefs.
By Lionel Milogram, Ph.D., F.R.S.C., M.A.R.H.
