Why is the WHO promoting homeopathy?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is meant to implore us to ignore hearsay and folklore, and to follow the scientific evidence. So why is it now suddenly promoting the likes of herbal medicine, homeopathy and acupuncture? In a series of tweets this week, the WHO has launched a campaign to extol the virtues of what it calls ‘traditional medicine’. ‘Traditional medicine has been at the frontiers of medicine and science, laying the foundation of conventional medical texts’, it asserts. It goes on to claim that ‘around 40 per cent of approved pharmaceutical products in use today derive from natural substances’. After telling us the story of an Olympic long-jumper who swears by yoga and meditative walks (which are not exactly medicines, but forms of relaxation), it then poses the question: ‘which of these have you used: “acupuncture, Ayurveda, herbal medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, unani medicine?”’

Let’s leave aside the untruth that homeopathy and naturopathy are somehow ‘traditional’ – the former was invented by a German physician in 1797 and the latter is a 19th-century idea. That many medicines have their origins in extracts from plants is of course true, but that rather misses the point. Scientific medicine seeks to isolate active ingredients, and understand how they work before synthesising them and using them in a controlled manner. That is a world away from swigging some concoction which your grandmother has sworn by ever since her own grandmother gave it to her for a fever. That some folk medicines might sometimes appear to work – in spite of apparently having no active ingredients – is itself explained by scientific inquiry: there is a proven ‘placebo effect’ that causes people to report an improvement in their symptoms as a result of taking something that they think will make them better.

The WHO should be having nothing to do with promoting any medicine which has not been proven without rigorous trials. So why is it suddenly pushing all kinds of dubious cures? It is hard not to see the latest campaign as part of the fashionable campaign to ‘decolonise’ medicine – which means refusing to see western science as superior to belief systems that have derived from elsewhere in the world. The WHO published a podcast on this subject in May, in which a Canadian medical historian, for example, denounced the concept of ‘tropical’ medicine as a construct by colonial powers to try to promote the false idea that the Third World presented a danger to Europe. I wonder whether she might change her mind if she contracted yellow fever, dengue fever, ebola, trichuriasis, or many of the other diseases which are prevalent in the tropics and still present a threat to people who travel there from Europe.

It might not suit the prejudices of Marxist academics to admit it, but the WHO has achieved a massive amount by unashamedly exporting rigorous scientific inquiry to parts of the world which it had yet to reach. It wasn’t folk medicine that eradicated smallpox; it was western medicine, and the WHO should not be apologising for that. Promoting quackery seems an odd – and potentially disastrous – direction for the organisation to take.