§ Earl Baldwin of Bewdleyasked Her Majesty's Government:
Why homoeopathy and healing are not on the approved list of complementary therapies which may be offered within prisons.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Bassam of Brighton)My Lords, the Prison Service recognises the potential value of complementary therapies. Homoeopathy and healing can take a wide variety of forms and the Prison Service has a duty to ensure that all treatments provided to prisoners meet their health heeds and are safe and effective. The list of permitted therapies are acupuncture, osteopathy, chiropractic, yoga and meditation. Treatments not on the list of normally permitted therapies may be made available on the recommendation of a prison doctor.
§ Earl Baldwin of BewdleyMy Lords, lam grateful to the noble Lord for his reply. However, would he not agree that the reason given against homoeopathy in a Prison Service letter last year that it,
involves the administration of a range of ill-defined substances [with] potential for abuse",is curious, to say the least, in view of the usual criticism of homoeopathy that it deals in dilutions that are so minute that they cannot possibly have any effect at all, and in view of the opinion expressed by the Medicines Control Agency at a Select Committee hearing this Monday, that it is,very much at the safe end of the spectrum",which is something that one could say with even more force about healing?
§ Lord Bassam of BrightonMy Lords, homoeopathy can involve the applicational ingestion of a wide range of non-prescribed substances. I do not believe that we want to encourage too much the taking of non-prescribed substances. However, of course, we recognise the importance of homoeopathy, and requests to use homoeopathic remedies will be considered very carefully. That continues to be the case. We do not have a closed mind on homoeopathy and a number of prisoners have had access to that form of treatment within the Prison Service.