by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Health Minister Lauterbach wants to remove homeopathy as a health insurance benefit. How come? Because “services that have no medically proven benefit may not be financed from contributions.” It is difficult to attribute such a statement to either incompetence or lobbying.
Homeopathy is a “dangerous pseudoscience,” Karl Lauterbach tweeted in 2022. He could have found robust evidence of how effective this type of therapy can be at least six years earlier in a meta-analysis that evaluated placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized, controlled studies. The result was that homeopathic medicines are one and a half to two times more likely to have an effect compared to placebo when prescribed as part of an individually tailored treatment. There are now around 170 high-quality studies, and in most of them, homeopathy has proven to be superior to a placebo. None of these were taken into account by the National Health and Research Council (NHMRC) when it “reviewed” homeopathy. The “Scientific Advisory Council of the European Academies” (EASAC), which advises the EU Commission, also ignored them in its scandalous statement on homeopathy. Incredible, along the lines of: “My eyes are closed, so it’s dark.”
By the way, Lauterbach’s measure would relieve the statutory authorities of just ten million euros. In the hunt for “services without medically proven benefit,” shouldn’t he have preferred the “protective” masks and “protective” vaccinations of the Corona years? This alone would have saved a double-digit billion sum, which could easily be used to buy every German household a heat pump – and every farm its cheap diesel.
Just like an illness with globules, our health minister constructs the most limping of all comparisons, “climate change cannot be fought with dowsing rods” – or a wave of viral infections with a facial diaper.
Furthermore, every fan of scientific evidence would be extremely pleased if the criterion of “medically proven benefit” were finally applied mercilessly to all products and services of conventional medicine. Where would our health insurance contribution rates be if this were done consistently?
A Dutch research group summarized why homeopathy continues to have such difficulty convincing skeptics in 1991 after evaluating 107 controlled studies on homeopathy: “We are surprised by the amount of positive evidence, even among the best studies. Based on the data, we would be willing to accept that homeopathy can be effective if only the mechanism of action were more plausible.” But is it impossible for a phenomenon to exist as long as it is unclear why? Anyone who can’t tell the two apart has no idea about science. Then, he would be better as a pharmaceutical representative than as a health minister.
An outlook from the US market research company Transparency Market Research gives an idea of what this could actually be about. Global sales of homeopathic products, which were $10.7 billion in 2021, will grow to $32.4 billion by the end of 2031. Isn’t it annoying that Big Pharma is losing market share as a result?
(Harald Wiesendanger)
Cover photo: Collage of photos by Bruno/Pixabay and Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110143015
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