Why is the WHO promoting homeopathy?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is meant to implore us to ignore hearsay and folklore, and to follow the scientific evidence. So why is it now suddenly promoting the likes of herbal medicine, homeopathy and acupuncture? In a series of tweets this week, the WHO has launched a campaign to extol the virtues of what it calls ‘traditional medicine’. ‘Traditional medicine has been at the frontiers of medicine and science, laying the foundation of conventional medical texts’, it asserts. It goes on to claim that ‘around 40 per cent of approved pharmaceutical products in use today derive from natural substances’. After telling us the story of an Olympic long-jumper who swears by yoga and meditative walks (which are not exactly medicines, but forms of relaxation), it then poses the question: ‘which of these have you used: “acupuncture, Ayurveda, herbal medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, unani medicine?”’

Let’s leave aside the untruth that homeopathy and naturopathy are somehow ‘traditional’ – the former was invented by a German physician in 1797 and the latter is a 19th-century idea.