On June 10th, the Bristol Post reported that the local NHS will no longer be offering homeopathic services. I was shocked to find that the NHS offers this rubbish at all. Borrowing from Trotsky again (whose writing I’ve been enjoying lately as you might have already noticed from my last piece), homeopathy is pseudo-scientific nonsense and all assertions to the contrary are the fruit of ignorance and charlatanism.
Homeopathic “medicine” takes substances that usually cause certain ailments and dilutes them to the point of being near indistinguishable from just water thus magically making them curative. I’d like to hope I’m preaching to the choir when telling university students that this stuff is nonsense but I was unaware that these kinds of “treatments” were available on the NHS.
Perhaps some of the money saved on scrapping homeopathy could be put towards education or another socially beneficial policy but unless the general public is aware that their tax money is being wasted then it will probably be a while for policy to catch up with the evidence it’s supposedly based on.
Fellow students, as the future intelligentsia of our society, some of the responsibility is on us to share this knowledge that can help improve public health (cutting NHS waste will help), so if you hear someone talking about homeopathy working with no detectable irony, then it’s not intellectual arrogance, rather it’s in the interests of everyone for you to tell them that they are emphatically wrong.
Editor’s Note: This was originally uploaded to TheKnowledge. Someone wrote a response article you can read here. While I would like to respond to this and other response articles I’ve had written against my own, the editing team didn’t want to clog the site up with the same topic of conversation. I will say here, that I stand by what I said and think it is terribly worrying that a university student is so scientifically illiterate. I also don’t care about telling them emphatically they are wrong because spreading pseudoscientific lies is dangerous and harmful to society- search about anti-vaxxers for more evidence of this. It might offend them to have their ridiculous beliefs called stupid but it offends me more that you would risk human lives because of your ego or investment bias.
Cleft Habitus.com 