I was very surprised to see the My Turn ”Covid-19: A New Approach touting Homeopathic” remedies by Dale C. Moss having pride of place on the Opinion page on Wednesday. I do not think you should be publishing misleading “alternative facts” in your reputable newspaper without, as Cathy Stanton writes another letter about “Scare Tactics,” giving these mistaken ideas some kind of counter-balancing statement.

Mr. Moss gives some statistics that must have been snatched from the air concerning the mortality rate during the Spanish Flu of 1% for Homeopathy and 30% lost for conventional medicine. Where do these percentages come from? For instance, 1 % of what? 30% of what?

Secondly, the riddle of the London Cholera Epidemic where 10,000 souls died, was solved by Rev. Henry Whitehead and Dr. John Snow who used scientific inquiry, observation and detective work to discover the source of the microbial spread of the water-born disease. Their ideas had been dismissed by the scientific community, the conventional wisdom at that time being that the disease was spread through dank odors or “miasmatic air.” On top of that, there were no conventional medicines like antibiotics at that time to cure the hapless victims.

So where did the Mr Moss obtain his statistics for this? As far as I know there weren’t comparative statistics in 1854 for Cholera. Conventional medicine at that time was not based on science, but the solution that Dr. Snow found that would save countless people all over the world was using the science of epidemiology, not homeopathy.

As Dale C. Moss propounds in his My turn piece is to “keep patients from needing hospitalization” not by using unproven homeopathic remedies, but by using testing and tracing, social distancing and hand washing. In other words tried and tested scientific methods, not heresay and anecdotes.

My point is, especially in this world of crazy conspiracy theories and non scientists putting out their own cures and treatments (like Donald Trump, ex. bleach and UV light), we have to take all claims with several pinches of salt and check that the statements make sense and not follow them blindly.

Annette Kilminster

Greenfield