Sir, – Dr David Robert Grimes should swallow some of his own medicine (Opinion, September 20th). He cites the thousands of patients harmed or killed by alternative practitioners but fails to give the statistics for the hundreds of thousands of patients who have equally suffered at the hands of inept doctors and other medical practitioners. Perhaps he would also like to explain how his claims that the success of homoeopathy and such like depends on the placebo effect can be curative on animals and children who have no concept of its theory.
Those of us, including scientists and pharmacists, who have benefited from alternative medicine where conventional medicine has failed us are all, according to Dr Grimes, delusional. If Dr Grimes had been alive when the most eminent scientists of the day proclaimed the earth to be flat what would he have said? – Yours, etc,