For months, health professionals in France have been promoting the awareness and information #NoFakeMed campaign, advocating that the country’s public health system stops accommodating pseudo-medicine.
And they have just won a battle — France’s August 31, 2019 edition of the Government Gazette reports that the Ministry of Health decided to remove homeopathic preparations from the list of medicines covered by the health system:
[A]s was announced by the High Authority for Health (HAS) in its ruling on homeopathy, homeopathic specialities “do not have a therapeutic efficacy superior to placebo or an active comparator; moreover, as part of a therapeutic strategy, they do not make it possible to reduce the consumption of other medicines”, and their lack of medical service “does not make it possible to maintain their care”. Therefore, it is necessary to “exclude homeopathic magistral preparations from the coverage”.
Thus, Article R 163-1. of the Social Security Code is supplemented by a paragraph which excludes magistral preparations obtained “from substances called homeopathic strains, according to a homeopathic manufacturing process described by the European Pharmacopoeia, the French Pharmacopoeia or, failing that, by the pharmacopoeias officially used in another Member State of the European Union”.
The Decree will enter into force on January 1st, 2020, when the reimbursement for homeopathic preparations will drop from 30% to just 15%. And on January 1st, 2021, France will cease to subsidize homeopathy altogether.
The best available evidence points out that homeopathy does not work, so it is refreshing to find that at least in one corner of the world there are those who administer the resources and base everyone’s laws on what we can claim with reasonable certainty to be true. In 2019, this is news worthy of celebration.
It is worth pointing out that homeopathy hasn’t been banned, and that this only means that whoever wants to resort to these preparations must do so with their own money, for taxpayers should not have to pay for the irrational beliefs of others.
Charlatanry has lost another round to Reason in the cradle of Enlightenment. Cheers!
(h/t: Mauricio-José Schwarz | pic: Curious Expeditions )
