Support the Glasgow Skeptics in their fight against quackery

As some of my previous posts have indicated, I am not a great fan of Homeopathy. It is based on flawed principles that have been demonstrated to be wrong, it violates the Laws of Physics and it puts people at risk of harm and even death. It is quackery of the highest order and an embarrassment to a supposedly advanced post-Enlightenment society.

Sadly, however, we have a pro-Homeopathy MP on both the Commons Health Committee and Commons Science and Technology Committee. Furthermore, although not promoted on the NHS Choices website, this proven sham remedy is still available on the NHS despite having no evidence that it works other than as a placebo (what with them being nothing more than sugar pills).

One such NHS-funded travesty is the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital. The Glasgow Skeptics are understandably saddened by this threat to Reason in their backyard and have set up a petition to NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to withdraw funding for Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital:

The Deputy Chairman of the junior doctors committee of the British Medical Association (BMA) has called homeopathy “witchcraft” and “nonsense on stilts”, whilst the BMA conference declared in 2010 that homeopathy has “no place in the modern health service”.

The NHS Choices website states that “there is no good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition”, whilst the BMA's director of science and ethics, Dr Vivienne Nathanson, has said that “the funding of the homeopathic hospital should stop”.

It is therefore requested that NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde withdraw funding for Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital.

You can sign the petition at change.org, here. They deserve the support of all right-minded individuals who want publicly-funded medicine to be evidence-based.

(Sadly, thanks to "Bad Pharma" not even medicine that appears to have evidence for efficacy is necessarily any good. If we cannot even dump the stuff that is proven to be crap, how can we hope to clean up the more complex mess of biased evidence?)