Patients may need health insurance for homeopathic treatments

More UK residents could be tempted to take up a health insurance plan if the government decides it will no longer pay for people's homeopathic treatments.

According to one expert, patients who want to use the alternative form of treatment, which consists of diluted remedies that are believed to cause effects similar to the symptoms being suffered, should pay for it themselves.

Last week, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report recommending that the government should no longer fund homeopathic treatments on the NHS.

Speaking to the Sun, following their decision, Edzard Ernst, professor of alternative medicine at Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, said: "If patients want to spend their own money on homeopathy that's fine. But no more public money should be wasted on it."

He criticised the validity of research showing clinical improvements in patients taking homeopathic remedies, adding that most are so diluted that traces of the original substance no longer remain.

However, Cristal Sumner, of the British Homeopathic Association, told the newspaper that such treatments have been a part of the NHS since it was set up and are founded on the basis that "like cures like".

"I believe patients should retain their right to access homeopathy on the NHS," she added.

Scientists cannot explain how 75 per cent of people catch the superbug C. difficile, after a study showed that only a quarter of infections in one hospital system were traced to contact with a suffering...

Up to one in five men is carrying a gene from their father that increases their risk of coronary heart disease by 50 per cent. A study has found that men can inherit a form of heart disease from their father...

An interesting new study indicates that starvation paired with chemotherapy can significantly reduce the growth of cancer cells, matching or improving the effects of chemotherapy alone. Scientists at the...

Scientists have reversed the effects of Alzheimer’s disease in mice using an already licensed skin cancer drug. Destructive plaques commonly found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients were broken...

Chemotherapy during pregnancy does not necessarily harm the unborn child, according to a ground-breaking new report. The study, published in the Lancet Oncology journal, shows that children born to women...