Here follows a bizarre statement made by one Dr Tom Dolphin, deputy chairman of the BMA’s junior doctors committee in England: – as reported in The Telegraph:  “Homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a disgrace that nestling between the National Hospital for Neurology and Great Ormond Street [in London] there is a National Hospital for Homeopathy which is paid for by the NHS”.

Here is the reason that it is not a disgrace: At the outset of the NHS in 1948 several existing homeopathic hospitals (built by the benefactors of homeopathy) including the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital in Great Ormond Street, were invited to become part of the NHS and a by-law in 1950 stated that homeopathy should be available to the people of the UK as long as there were doctors willing to supply it. The whole campaign against NHS homeopathy is a profoundly anti-democratic attempt to use our system of universal health care to bully a significant minority of patients who want homeopathy on the NHS and benefit from it – however it works. So much for that ‘patient choice’ we were promised!

As I’ve written many times, if people like Dolphin, Ernst, Goldacre, Colquhoun, Singh et al think that NHS medicine should be exclusively evidence based, then let them campaign for that and they may be dismayed to find out that more than half of ordinary medicine is not evidenced based. To use EBM as a blunt tool to batter homeopathy exclusively is deeply disingenuous as I’ve said many times and never been refuted.

Now for that comment: ‘Homeopathy is  NHS witchcraft’

From where in history does the good Dr Dolphin get his inspiration? England 1645-1647 or  Salem 1692?

Perhaps the young doc sees himself on a similar mission to that of Matthew Hopkins, the notorious ‘Witchfinder General’  who during the English civil war of the 17th century, self-righteously sent many so-called ‘witches’ to trial by kangaroo court and execution.

The campaign against NHS homeopathy has been so nasty, so disingenuous and such a slap in the face for democracy and liberty, it would not surprise me if someone now called for all homeopaths to undergo the witch-detecting Water Test in The Serpentine. Those that don’t drown could be unceremoniously burnt at the stake in Hyde Park.