September 9, 2004 – In France, the controversy surrounding the reimbursement by Social Security of homeopathic products resumed this week, with the dissemination of a press release from the National Academy of Medicine1 which claims the total delisting.
Wanting to take advantage of the looming social security reform, the National Academy of Medicine is throwing a pavement in the pool of alternative health approaches. On the one hand, the members of the Academy denounce the “propaganda” to which the manufacturers are engaged by presenting their homeopathic products “like medicines”.
On the other hand, they do not accept that homeopathic products are reimbursed without having to follow the same process to which any medicine is subjected, that is to say demonstrate – scientific evidence to support – that they have a ” therapeutic interest ”.
Convinced in advance that this interest does not exist, the academicians invite France to join the ranks of other European countries which have abolished the reimbursement of homeopathic products, namely Italy, Spain, Finland, Sweden, Norway and, more recently, Germany.
For its part, the National Syndicate of French Homeopathic Doctors (SNMHF) qualified the Academy’s proposal as an “unfounded attack”, insisting that “homeopathy is a practice recognized by the Order of Physicians, taught at university, and acclaimed by 40% of French people ”.
The union also deplored the Academy’s point of view according to which homeopathy would be an “obsolete method”, relying on “the future high authority of medicine” which will decide on the basis of work and studies validated “and not on a priori Like those expressed by the Academy.
Faced with the scale of the controversy, the French Minister of Health, Philippe Douste-Blazy, announced that he would take a decision to this effect next February, after having received the opinion of the senior public health authorities. “It is true that there are cases where homeopathy can be interesting”, he said on France-Inter, specifying that “my inclination is not to reimburse things that are useless and to reimburse those who serve ”.
It was at the instigation of a socialist minister in favor of alternative medicine that in 1984, 111 homeopathic products were included in the list of medicines reimbursed by health insurance. In December 2003, the then Minister of Health, François Mattei, reduced the reimbursement rate for these products from 65% to 35%.
Martin LaSalle – Proteus Network
According to Release, Le Figaro and AP.
1. To access the press release from the National Academy of Medicine: www.academie-medecine.fr [Consulté le 9 septembre 2004].