How to Become a Physician Assistant

Religion, science and medicine are three words that cannot be mentioned in the same breath without controversy or argument. There are people who argue that God and science are on opposite sides of the spectrum and that it is God who heals, not medicine, others who believe that the power of faith combines with the facts of science to effect cures, and yet others who swear by science as the only rational explanation for healing and cure. The easiest way to resolve any dispute between these groups and various others who fall somewhere in the middle of all these ideologies is to agree to disagree and follow the “each to their own” principle. But apparently the Science and Technology committee in Britain is not agreeable to this when it comes to homeopathy, the alternative branch of medicine that treats illnesses and diseases with a diluted strain of whatever caused the symptoms in the first place. Although not as controversial as scientology and other eccentric forms of treatment, homeopathy has nonetheless come in for its share of criticism because its detractors claim that it does not really cure and that the drugs cause only placebo effects. The British Science and Technology committee is against the fact that homeopathic remedies can still be paid for by Britain’s public National Health Service (NHS). Why shell out public money for something that is not really medicine and which hasn’t been proven, asks this parliamentary panel. It also demands that homeopathy producers should be banned from making medical claims on product labels without providing evidence that they work. Just because a limited number of people believe in this form of medicine and treatment, there’s no need to continue spending public money on it, according to the committee which labels homeopathic medicine as just a bunch of “sugar pills”. This move probably comes in the wake of the pressure being piled on the government to bring down the nation’s public deficit in any way it can. The committee estimates that even the £152,000 being spent on homeopathic remedies (a miniscule amount when we consider than the annual budget of the NHS is around £100 billion) is too much, unless homeopaths can prove that their treatment methods are scientifically valid. While it remains to be seen if the committee will get what it wants, the fact is that medicine is not always science-based. People all over the world believe in cures and treatment methods that have no foundation whatsoever in the world of science and rationalism. And it’s not just that they believe, the unorthodox methods seem to work for many of them. Skeptics cry foul and cite every reason in the book, from placebo effect to pure humbug. But people continue to believe and trust what they want to believe, not what science dictates. Perhaps the reason for this lies in the human psyche – most of us use our hearts more than our heads; we’re never completely rational and are ruled by our emotions most of the time. This is why most people prefer to choose alternative forms of treatment over conventional methods that are scientifically proven, so homeopathy or humbug, it should be left to the choice of the people without a committee butting its nose into the issue.