Friday, September 01, 2006

Homeopathic remedies to be licensed as medicines

There was an interesting debate on the Today Programme about the new regulatory system that allows homeopathic remedies to be licensed as medicine.

This reminds me that couple of years back the Liberal Democrat peer Dick Taverne published an excellent book, The march of unreason, a robust defence of scientific method against the claims of faux medicine and some of the claims made by the environmental lobby. He made the point that alternative medicine is a big business in its own right and yet manages to get away with sounding like part of the counter-culture unlike the nasty, capitalist pharmaceutical companies.

There is an interesting article about Taverne's book on Spiked which you can read here.

POSTSCRIPT: Alex Wilcock has written at length and with great vituperation on this subject. Let's hope he managed to have a couple of aspirin and had a good lie down after publishing this post.

1 comment:

Alex Wilcock said...

Oh, there's no need for aspirin, Iain, not when I can take my millionth-part tincture of nutmeg and instantly find calm of mind and all my ills cured ;-)

Well, actually it was industrial-sized quantities of chocolate, but that's not nutty enough to be properly 'alternative'... And I threw in the dash of informed theology for free, didn't I?

Good tip on The march of unreason, by the way.