The petition, which attracted 1,333 signatures, requested that ‘NICE urgently investigates why scarce NHS resources are being committed to this seemingly unproven form of treatment.’
But the government response pointed to an examination of homeopathy by the The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.
In the committees' report ‘it is made clear that the DoH will not stop allowing the funding for homeopathy on the NHS and that decisions on the provision of such treatments are the responsibility of the NHS,' the response says.
The petition’s creator, Dr Alan Bennett, writes: ‘Many new medicines are unavailable because their cost to performance ratio, as judged by NICE, does not equate with NHS norms. Many people feel that homeopathy has not been evaluated with anything approaching the the same rigor.’
