Homeopathy: AIFA recognizes new products

Homeopathic preparations will be introduced in the national pharmaceutical handbook. This is an important milestone for homeopathy and users will derive many advantages, for clarity of indications and for cost containment. However, there is a reverse of the coin that concerns the manufacturing companies and the economic investments that they will have to make to prepare the bureaucratic process.

But is this really good news?

Let’s try to better understand what is happening in this scenario of great transformation, perhaps more of an economic than cultural nature.

Recognition of homeopathic preparations

As we well know in Italy homeopathic medicine is not recognized, consequently not even the homeopathic remedies that we can in any case find in pharmacies, but which are without the so-called “leaflet”, without information on indications and dosage. The costs of the preparations are quite high which makes homeopathy a practice for the few.

The recognition of homeopathic remedies in Italy allows for a regulation of the practice , of the doctors who practice it and of the indications concerning the use of the preparations.

Costs could also suffer a reduction in the face of a greater diffusion on the market and perhaps their introduction in the national pharmaceutical formulary with a prescription to be paid by the National Health System.

This is a big step forward which also serves to protect the end user from misdirecting the properties of homeopathic remedies.

The costs of recognition

However, this goal is not painless. In reality it costs, it costs a lot, indeed a lot. The bureaucratic process applied to the manufacturing companies is the same applied to the multinationals of the drug and without being great experts on the subject we can understand that the debacle will be ferocious and not everyone will be able to economically survive this recognition.

Until some time ago there were about 6,000 homeopathic preparations on the Italian market which have drastically decreased to about 3,000 since the accreditation process of the dossiers on the remedies in question began in 2016, because the initial cost of each individual dossier is around a thousand. euro per drug, destined to increase up to 20 times as much.

The renewal of the AIC will then be every five years with relative payment and also the changes to the composition of the preparation will have an additional cost.

The consequence is that many companies in the sector will be in trouble and many remedies will not be produced to stem registration fees. On our market, however, there are many foreign brands, the French ones extremely widespread, which could represent an alternative where there was a lack of Italian production and this aspect could also represent a further difficulty for national companies.

We hope that the Ministry evaluates all aspects relating to the procedures for the recognition of the homeopathic remedy , and that if there must be a selection, it is a qualitative selection !!!!