The NHS budget has been battered recently, not least by the scandal of over £6 billions spent on a central computer system, that mercifully doesn’t work and that anyone with any sense will be able to opt out of.

So this particular example of a mad waste of NHS funds is small potatoes in comparison. A/c to the BBC, Peter Hain has set aside £200,000 to be spent on a year’s trial of providing “alternative therapies” at two general practices in Londonderry and Belfast.

Don’t waste the year, I can tell you now how useful they are for half that amount. Please.

If they worked, they wouldn’t be “alternative”.

Weren’t there a load of recent news items about medical treatments (for cancer, Alzheimer’s, blindness) that people believe they need but which can’t be funded because the national body for clinical excellence says the medicines are too expensive and not cost-effective?

The alternative therapies (acupuncture, massage, homeopathy) will apparently be offered for stress and musculoskeletal disorders.

Well, for musculoskeletal disorders, I thought we had physiotherapy? Even, more “alternatively”, subsidised gym memberships for people recovering from MSDs to get strength back through their own efforts?

And stress? Come on, what is stress? If your life is a bit crappy, then you will be stressed. A backrub massage won’t help much for more than half an hour, and so might a good walk in the park. Or a good comedy show. Or a nice cup of tea. Whatever. Is it a doctor’s job to give you little treats from public money when your boss treats you like dirt?

More serious stress, showing up as depression or breakdown, needs more serious treatment. Granted that most current treatments may be pretty poor at dealing with mental health problems, it doesn’t mean that expensive placebos are ever going to be a better alternative.

Give out sugar coated chalk pills if you can’t do anything for patients but want to look as if you have a solution.

In any case, can you imagine how slighted you’d feel if you went to your doctor with a bad back or a case of agaraphobia and s/he said words to the effect of “Go to this charlatan, please.” Doesn’t that say that your doctor thinks you are a hypochondriac?

But then Peter Hain has outed himself as a hypochondriac, by saying he uses alternative medicine himself and thinks people who can’t afford it should be able to. How egalitarian of him.

This is too much like somone who keeps falling for email scams (“Esteemed person of repute. Help me get my money out of “wherever) offering to fund those of us who can’t fall for them because we have no cash to send.

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