Socking hypocrisy in anti-CAM campaign

Evidence-based medicine is a worthy objective. According to the Oxford-based Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, “Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research.”

The present campaign against homeopathy and other complementary therapies makes extensive use of these aims to justify calls for these therapies’ exclusion from the NHS on the grounds that there is “no evidence” for their efficacy. I’ve gone into the evidence question in relation to homeopathy in other posts. This one looks at the evidence base for biomedical treatment. After all, if biomedical treatment is to be so clearly preferred over the complementary therapies which presently lack the robust evidence base being demanded, then one would assume that biomedical treatments have a clear advantage here.

One would assume wrongly.