Leaving the Land of Woo

This disgraceful advertisement is currently running.  NHS Tayside are looking for a quack nurse who specialises in the magical use of water to provide nothing better than placebo to gullible patients.

Notice the phrase "you will provide expert patient care in the management of homeopathic remedies".  Since homeopathy has absolutely no evidence of efficacy, it simply isn't possible to be expert in homeopathy - it does nothing at all!

But apart from the patient con that homeopathy is anything other than a claim for magical properties of water, there is a much more insidious aspect to this advertisement.  The nurse they want will already be state registered and either already a graduate or working towards graduate status so will already have been educated in clinical science.  The specialisation they talk about is actually the introduction of magical beliefs into medicine.

The idea that it is possible to have "post registration experience and experience of homeopathy" as a clinically valuable attribute fudges the distinction between clinical experience and something devoid of any evidence whatsoever.  If the advertisement had instead said something like "post registration experience and experience of animistic ritual healing" eyebrows would certainly be raised.  There is the same level of evidence of efficacy and yet blurring the boundaries between established science and nonsense is so advanced, this advertisement is accepted and issued.

So nurses are conned into thinking that this is a credible career path.  Patients are conned into thinking that since the NHS offers it, it must be evidence-based, and the gullible public are encouraged to rely on magic rather than medicine.  And while administrators who have less scientific understanding than primary school children draw up advertisements for jobs with expertise in nonsense, public money is spent on this fatuous dishonest business.

Maybe some of the money should be spent teaching the administrators some rudimentary science before they can be trusted to spend any more public money.  As it is, they are blowing the cash on utterly discredited irrational beliefs and at the very least, the person who drew up the job description desperately needs some basic science education.  As it stands, they are certainly not competent to assess what is and is not medicine.