Peter Hain in The Independent writes about how happy he is that the NHS now offers complimentary and alternative health care, alongside conventional medicine. We get an endearing look at why the NHS does not, in fact, work. Rather than hiring a few people to stick needles into unexpected places, or perhaps even someone to teach nurses to wash their hands, something that would do a great deal for the health of the nation, this is what he actually applauds:
I am pleased that the Welsh Assembly Government is looking into opportunities to support complementary therapies within the NHS in Wales. Officials have been liaising with the Department of Health and the Prince’s Foundation about these issues and at this stage it has agreed to promote a guide for patients on complementary health care developed by the foundation across Wales.
Bureaucrats get to chat to each other over tea and biscuits while clocking up their inflation proof final salary pensions. Un huh, that’s great Peter, really healing the sick and helping the lame to walk that is. Rather a sad come down in mental capacity for a man who in his younger days had a sure, if perverse, moral certainty in his campaigning against Apartheid. We also see this:
One in five Britons, myself included, now uses complementary health care;
There is, in fact, no such thing as complimentary health care. There is that which works, as proven in double blind tests. This is known as “medical care”. There is that which does not work and depends upon the gullibility of both the provider and the patient. This is known as “not medicine” or mumbo jumbo. That there might be things in the second class which do indeed work, I am willing to believe. Let’s test them in the proper manner and then they will be “medicine”. Otherwise that one in five figure is just proof, once again, that one in five Britons, including the Secretary of State for Wales, are idiots.
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