• I MUST respond to David Reed’s letters (Claims made for homeopathy are a nonsense, October 26 and Test the medicines, November 9), and his view that homoeopathy should not be available on the National Health Service.

What is his axe? If it’s to save taxpayers’ money then there are plenty of health care issues to campaign against. The health service has spent billions of pounds on the promotion of antibiotics – to now be spending yet more billions to prevent harm from their overuse. The list is long.

Contrary to what Mr Reed says, The University Hospital Bristol continues: “The homeopathic service (which) offers a general service for children and adults with a wide range of chronic illnesses and a complementary cancer care service”.

If homeopathy is good enough for the royal family, perhaps it can also help the masses? The Queen Mother lived to 101.

But “vitalism”, according to Mr Reed, is “balderdash”.

No one is arguing that a molecule is anything but a molecule. Homoeopathy is vibrational / quantum energy. Quantum mechanics has only recently declared that “light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave” (phys.org).

The argument against homeopathy is that nothing is there, yet “scientists have discovered a new way to seemingly get something from that nothingness…” (Scientific American).

The Lancet acknowledges there is “insufficient evidence” for or against homeopathy. Some scientific papers suggest keeping an ‘open mind’”.

A “systematic review of systematic reviews of homeopathy” (British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology) states that while “Collectively these data do not provide sound evidence that homeopathic remedies are clinically different from placebos…

“Many of the included reviews are from the present author’s team, and this could have introduced bias”.

The problem with double blind trials with homeopathy is: a) there has been little funding for it; and b) one cannot always count on a one-suits-all remedy for a specific condition, and so individual constitution usually needs to be considered in relation to the condition.

Consequently big pharma cannot market it profitably. Hence the vendetta against homeopathy.

A good way to demonstrate that homeopathy is not just a placebo effect (any more than allopathic medicine can be) is to look at all the stunning results with animals – who don’t even know that they’ve taken anything. Vets and farmers testify.

I have personally experienced astounding results with homeopathy that extensive allopathic medicine could not achieve. Any practitioner-attention-placebo-effect doesn’t apply because I generally self-prescribe.

Based on the millions of positive testimonials, and royal patronage, homeopathy should have a place in the National Health Service.

CLARA WEISS, NW3