Money for nothing

Ten million quid.

That's what the NHS (aka the taxpayer aka you and me) spent on refurbishing a hospital. Not your local hospital down the road that's strapped for cash. Not a centre of excellence for the treatment of cancer or heart disease. Not a hospice or a children's ward. Not even paying the salaries of five hundred nurses.

No.

This was to do up The London Homeopathic Hospital, including fitting some very nice wooden floors (don't see those down at the local A&E very often). Homeopathy is untested, unproven and, to put it mildly, complete nonsense - ingredients diluted to the point of non-existence (supposedly to one molecule in the entire solar system), water that somehow retains a memory of one molecule and not anything else that is been in contact with, a principle that sounds plausible ("like cures like") until you stop and think about it for more than a moment. The beneficial effects that are seen are more to do with the practitioners (who require no formal training or qualification to be able to charge large sums for their services) having the luxury of spending an hour listening sympathetically to the patients before giving them a small vial of water. If they gave them a teabag and warmed the water up, then it really would be tea and sympathy that the NHS is paying for.

Believe what you like, but at the heart of all of these remedies - the atlantean DNA realignment, kineseology, chakras, pick 'n' mix angels, crystals, spirit healing and the rest - there will always be somebody making a fast buck. It's big business too - to the tune of 1.6 billion pounds last year (how many hospitals could that fund?).

The danger comes in rejecting proven, scientifically tested therapies for no good reason. If you choose not have treatment for a disease in favour of paying money to have extra triangles inserted in your DNA then it's your lookout. When tabloid reading middle class parents who were happy to trust in the herd immunity of other people as long as they didn't have to have their own children treated rejected the MMR vaccine, the inevitable result has been the reappearance of measles as a deadly disease.