Don’t laugh too loudly at Homeopathy

Keith Hudson

The EU Commissioners are ‘mandating’ farmers to use herbal homeopathic methods for treating sick animals. We can reliably say that, because homeopathy requires diluting ‘remedies’ a million or a billion times, it simply does not work. Homeopathy is one of early Victorian medical treatments which parallels blood-letting and the application of leeches — in short, quite as worthless as most treatments of Medieval times (although many Medieval herbal treatments . . . are now being serious attention by scientists). All the vets and biologists are falling over themselves in laughter (albeit somewhat wryly) that the EU has fallen for this homeopathy superstition.

How could this happen? Well, perhaps the EU Commissioner of Agriculture is a personal believer in homeopathy. More likely, though, is that homeopathic interest groups have been quietly lobbying him or her, and the Commissioner has realized that several thousand homeopathic practitioners and patients in Europe might be pleased. However, homeopathy can’t be forced on farmers. It can never be “mandated”. In small print farmers are “allowed” to use vets for their sick animals if the homeopathic remedy does not suffice. How kind of the Commissioner!

But before supporters of modern medical treatments become too cocky, let’s remember that millions of beef cattle are injected with antibiotics every year and some of it will remain in the meat we eat. This by itself is harmless — they’re the same antibiotics that we ourselves are treated with — but, meanwhile, wide-scale use of antibiotics is building up wide-scale resistance to antibiotics by many pathogenic bacteria that are causing increasing numbers deaths in hospitals. Unless new families of antibiotics are discovered we are heading towards a future antibiotic catastrophe greater that kill lead to more deaths than the Black Plague in the Middle Ages according to some epidemiologists.