By the age of 60, one in five UK women will have had a hysterectomy (one in three in the USA), with around 60,000 women yearly having the procedure performed on the NHS. If you add up the cost to the country, at an average price of £4500 per op, it comes to a £270 million annual bill for the NHS. And that's without all the lost work days, sick pay and disruption to family life (and bedroom action).
Please hang on to that figure of £270 million while I digress a little. Back in 2015, Patient C, a woman in her early forties from Scotland, contacted me about a fibroid that had set up shop in her womb and was now running, and ruining, her life. She already had an NHS hysterectomy booked for six months time, and merely wanted help from me to manage her symptoms in the meanwhile.
She was a stoic sort, as so many of us Brits are, but I could tell she was suffering - stabbing pains in the lower abdomen, severe pain during intercourse, a protruding lower tummy like she'd just finished a three course meal, a menstrual cycle of 21 days with two week long bleeds in between leaving her menses free for a pitiful one week a month. The periods themselves were so painful, and more importantly so heavy, she couldn't leave the house without taking an industrial quantity of sanitary supplies and a change of clothing.
With such clear and strong symptoms it didn't take me long to find the right remedy, Sepia, in this case. I gave her 200c and then 1m repeated over the next few months. She responded extremely well with a visible shrinkage of the fibroid, so much so that she couldn't even feel it most days. Her heavy periods also disappeared. As her NHS op deadline drew near, she decided to postpone it for a while.
Six months after that her gynae consultant refused to give her another scan because she was no longer showing symptoms 'worth' surgery. In 2018 she's still postponing the op, in fact to be precise, she's signed herself off the waiting list altogether. My services for the entire course of treatment? Less than a first class return train ticket from London to Edinburgh, Patient C's childhood home.
Now back to that £270 million. Firstly, £270 million is approximately £265 million more than the entire NHS annual budget for homeopathy. Secondly, Patient C is just one of four such patients with fibroids who I have seen in the last few years and to date, none of them have taken up that offer of an op because, after homeopathic treatment, none felt the need. I calculate I've saved the NHS £18,000, and the ladies in question a considerable degree of discomfort and distress.
Now multiply my work by the number of homeopaths in the UK (about 6000). Let us all treat just one or two women with fibroids per year and already we have an annual NHS saving of £54 million. Even if only half of them respond to treatment, that's still £27 million (enough for about another 1000 nurses a year, FYI).
Whether you believe in the power of placebo or the power of homeopathy or neither, or both, offering women with gynaecological problems a stop off visit with a homeopath after the scan and before the hysterectomy might just be a cost saving experiment for the NHS that really pays off.