Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

The results were about to be announced in 1939, but the outbreak of the Second World War prevented publication. The original documents survived the war and were discussed again when the senior researchers reconvened in 1947, but unfortunately their conclusions were never formally announced. Worse still, the documents have never been seen again. It seems that the results of the first comprehensive study of homeopathy have been concealed, lost or destroyed.

Nevertheless, there exists one very detailed account of the Nazi research programme, which was written by Dr Fritz Donner and published post humously in 1995. Donner had joined the Stuttgart Homeopathic Hospital in the mid-1930s and had contributed to the national research programme in his capacity as a practising homeopath. According to Donner, who claims to have seen all the relevant documents, none of the trials gave any indication in favour of the efficacy of homeopathy: ‘It is unfortunately still not generally known that these comparative studies in the area of infectious diseases such as scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, typhus etc generated results which were not better for homeopathy than for placebo.’ He also added: ‘Nothing positive emerged from these tests…except the fact that it was indisputably established that the views [of homeopaths] were based on wishful thinking.’

If Donner was correct, then his statement would be a damning indictment of homeopathy. The first comprehensive and rigorous programme to test the claims of homeopathy, conducted by researchers who were sympathetic to the philosophy and who were to some extent under pressure to prove its validity, had arrived at a wholly negative conclusion. Of course, we cannot be sure that Donner’s report was accurate, as the vital documents have never resurfaced. It would, therefore, be wrong to condemn homeopathy based on the testimony of one man’s view of research conducted seventy years ago. But even if we ignore the supposed negative results of the Nazi research programme, it is still interesting to note that between Hahnemann’s initial research and the end of the Second World War, a period of some one and a half centuries, nobody succeeded in publishing any conclusive scientific evidence to support the notion of homeopathy.

Nature’s miracle

After the Second World War, mainstream medicine in America and Europe continued its relentless progress, thanks to further important scientific breakthroughs such as antibiotics. Meanwhile the homeopathic tradition was managing to survive only with the patronage of some powerful and sympathetic supporters. For example, George VI was a fervent believer, so much so that he even named one of his horses Hypericum, after the homeopathic remedy based on St John’s wort; the horse went on to win the One Thousand Guineas at Newmarket in 1946. Two years later, King George played an influential role in enabling homeopathic hospitals to come under the umbrella of the newly formed National Health Service.

In America, it was the influence of men like Senator Royal Copeland that allowed homeopathy to survive despite the general trend away from Hahnemann’s philosophy and towards the use of treatments with a more scientific and reliable foundation. Both a homeopath and a politician, Copeland successfully persuaded his colleagues that the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act should include the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States. The Act was supposed to protect patients from unproven or disproven remedies, and yet the claims of homeopathy were still based merely on anecdote and Hahnemann’s preaching. So, by including the entire homeopathic catalogue, the Act was giving undue credence to remedies that had no scientific basis.

In India, homeopathy was not only surviving, but it was actually thriving at every level of society, and this success had nothing to do with political manoeuvring or royal patronage. Homeopathy had been introduced there in 1829 by Dr Martin Honigberger, a Transylvanian physician who joined the court of Maharajah Ranjit Singh in Lahore. The idea then spread rapidly throughout India, prospering largely because it was perceived as being in opposition to the imperialist medicine practised by the British invaders. Attitudes towards British medicine were so negative, in fact, that vaccination programmes and attempts to quarantine plague casualties both failed dismally in the mid-nineteenth century.

Moreover, Indians who wanted to pursue a career in conventional medicine often encountered prejudice when they attempted to join the Indian Medical Service, so a more realistic (and cheaper) career option was to train to be a homeopathic practitioner. It was also felt that homeopathy and the Hindu Ayurvedic system of medicine could work together in harmony, and there were even rumours that Hahnemann himself had studied traditional Indian medicine.