Do you have a headache? Why don’t you take a pill? Maybe an aspirin, a paracetamol or an ibuprofen. Low dose, 200 milligrams, and you’ll probably feel better in 15 minutes. Millions of people with hangovers, toothaches or other suffering swear by it. Because they want an effect, a quick one. Sales of these medications would probably plummet if manufacturers suddenly produced them homeopathically and reduced the dosage to one millionth. Or even less.
Because then they would no longer work. As well as?
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has now announced that statutory health insurance companies will no longer be allowed to finance homeopathic (or anthroposophical) services from contributions in the future. If you still swear by it, you have to pay yourself. But health insurance companies can no longer make the community of insured people pay for it.
Finally, one would like to say here. Because it should actually go without saying: Anyone who wants to sell an effective drug should have to scientifically prove that it works beyond the placebo effect. Because you can have it without spending money on ineffective beads. Proof of benefits and risks should be provided through internationally recognized and standardized procedures, i.e. through randomized, controlled, double-blind studies.
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But when the approval of medicines was regulated in this sense in 1978, the Bundestag excluded homeopathy. The corresponding report from the Bundestag stated at the time that the effectiveness of homeopathy, anthroposophic medicine and phytotherapy, i.e. herbal medicine, could not be proven experimentally using available scientific test methods. Therefore, the empirical knowledge, some of which is centuries old, should also be recognized as proof of effectiveness. It was a free pass for any promise of healing. The main thing is that you have believed in the effect for long enough.
Later, the legislature went even further and allowed the health insurance companies to reimburse sugar balls without any effect at everyone’s expense – wonderful, especially for their PR departments. “We also have an alternative option,” sounds great. At least that should be over now. But the alternative medicine industry still does not have to undergo any scientifically based testing. What a waste of time. It would be good to know which of these might actually work and which is charlatanism. Instead, the globule industry can draw on a resource of which there was enough then as now: disappointment with and mistrust in what critics call conventional medicine.
And the dissatisfaction with classic healing methods is also justified. That’s why homeopathy bashing is always a bit cheap, at least from the perspective of people who feel badly treated by traditional doctors and are understandably looking for alternatives. The health system has been burning out for years, treatments too often follow an economic logic, many patients feel like they are being treated on an assembly line – doctors and nurses also suffer from this. This has long been clear to everyone involved; Lauterbach often talks about how sick the system is.
Above all, there is a lack of time and attention for patients. Homeopaths estimate one to two hours for an initial consultation. What is sadly famous, however, are the seven minutes that general practitioners in this country have for a patient. Not only does this feel like very little, but in an international comparison, Germany is at the lower end of the spectrum. In the USA and Sweden it is more than 20 minutes. Many doctors and nursing staff are struggling to have more time for their patients and to spend less time on bureaucracy.
The vacuum created by the lack of time in hospitals and practices is now being filled by alternative practitioners, alternative medicine specialists and anthroposophists. They will continue to prescribe their globules and wraps when they are no longer reimbursed by health insurance companies, and many people will continue to thank them for it. Because they work. Not in a clinical sense. But sick people feel better, and some people also feel measurably better, when they feel like they are in good hands.
However, homeopathic remedies are not risk-free: If, for example, people with a serious illness such as cancer delay effective therapy because they believe in globules, the globules become a danger. A more consistent reform would therefore make more sense, one that sends a clear signal: These are not medicines.
For Lauterbach, the globule reform remains an attempt at quick political success, even if nothing changes in the approval and marketing of homeopathic products. The experts will still celebrate Lauterbach for at least abolishing reimbursement. Lauterbach no longer makes friends in alternative medicine anyway.
For the chronically underfunded healthcare system, however, the savings, which Lauterbach puts at 20 to 50 million euros, are of a homeopathic nature. And the new regulation won’t change the basic problem of Europe’s most expensive health system in the world‘s fourth-largest economy: that doctors often don’t have the time and aren’t paid to look at people as a whole. At least that is what we could learn from so-called alternative medicine.
Do you have a headache? Why don’t you take a pill? Maybe an aspirin, a paracetamol or an ibuprofen. Low dose, 200 milligrams, and you’ll probably feel better in 15 minutes. Millions of people with hangovers, toothaches or other suffering swear by it. Because they want an effect, a quick one. Sales of these medications would probably plummet if manufacturers suddenly produced them homeopathically and reduced the dosage to one millionth. Or even less.