NHS turns off homeopathy
NHS trusts are dropping homeopathic treatments.
A study has found that only one third of primary care trusts still have contracts for homeopathic services. The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital is fighting for survival after eight trusts cancelled contracts over the past year and six more reduced referrals.
climate change health risks
Climate change is putting global human health at risk and requires an “urgent response”.
There is a 25 percent chance that a severe heat wave will strike England and kill more than 6,000 people before 2017 a Department of Health report says. Tens of thousands died across Europe in a heat wave during the summer of 2003, including over 14,000 people in France, but so far people living in Britain have coped with rising temperatures. [more]
Another medical author, Anthony McMichael, said human actions were causing “unprecedented global environmental changes”, including climate change, loss of bio-diversity and the exhaustion of fisheries. [more]
The World Health Organisation estimates that a quarter of the world’s diseases are due to the contamination of air, water, soil and food, with the “environment related burden” much greater in low income countries.
Dr Hugh Montgomery, of the Institute for Human Health and Performance, said climate change brings risks of collapsing ecosystems, migration and war. It could even threaten human survival.
homeopathy watchdog starts soon
A new homeopathy watchdog, the Natural HealthCare Council, is due to begin work in April. Membership of the body will be voluntary but it will have the power to strike organisations off its register.
It has been set up by the Prince of Wales’s Foundation for Integrated Health following a request from the Department of Health. The Prince of Wales and the Queen are known to be supporters of homeopathy.
UK ‘hooked on pills’
Meanwhile, the ‘mis-prescribing’ of drugs such as painkillers, sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety pills by doctors is ‘leading to addiction and dependence’, a parliamentary inquiry has concluded.
An all-party parliamentary group on drug misuse has found that Doctors are unwittingly fuelling the growing number of Britons hooked on prescription drugs by giving patients dangerously high doses of medicines that can prove highly addictive. [more]
Richard Hoey, deputy editor of Pulse (GPs’ newspaper) says: “If the NHS is now going to stop providing homeopathy, that needs to be a decision taken in the full glare of public debate, and not made in the committee rooms of cash-strapped trusts.”
Time to write to your GP, Primary Care Trust or MP?
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