Your editorial of December 11 ['So where is patient choice?'] should surely have praised rather than criticised Brent NHS for having the good sense to stop subsidising so-called homeopathic medicine, which is no more than a 21st Century version of 19th Century quackery.
Self-styled 'doctors' sold their patients bottles of coloured water as cure-alls, and I have no doubt that many of their customers, like their modern counterparts, genuinely believed that they had been 'cured' of their real or imagined illnesses. The NHS would be rightly criticised for paying for patients to visit religious shrines or witch doctors, although many people believe in their curative properties.
I suspect that many of these people are the very same who are hysterically rather than rationally opposed to the MMR vaccine, GM crops, nuclear power, and the latest scaremongering fad, peanuts!
BRIAN SCOTT
St Kilda's Road Harrow
