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

Indeed, most trials have not been individualized, but there have been trials in which patients were given detailed consultations and either individualized homeopathic prescriptions or placebo. For example, an individualized trial monitoring ninety-eight patients with chronic headaches over the course of twelve weeks led to the conclusion: ‘There was no significant difference in any parameter between homeopathy and placebo.’ Another trial focused on ninety-six children with asthma and looked at their progress after twelve months of receiving individualized homeopathy or a placebo as an adjunct to their conventional treatment. It concluded: ‘This study provides no evidence that adjunctive homeopathic remedies, as prescribed by experienced homeopathic practitioners, are superior to placebo.’

Shang’s view of homeopathy is backed up by the Cochrane Collaboration, the highly respected, independent evaluator of medicines introduced in the previous chapter. There are Cochrane reviews on homeopathy for the induction of labour and the treatment of dementia, chronic asthma and flu. Cochrane’s conclusions are based on sixteen trials involving over 5,000 patients. Over and over again, the evidence is either non-existent or shaky, leading to conclusions such as ‘there is not enough evidence to reliably assess the possible role of homeopathy in asthma’ ‘current evidence does not support a preventative effect’ and ‘there is insufficient evidence to recommend the use of homeopathy as a method of induction’.

It is interesting to contrast the tenor of these comments on homeopathy with Cochrane’s conclusion on a conventional medicine such as aspirin: ‘Aspirin is an effective analgesic for acute pain of moderate to severe intensity with a clear dose-response.’ Moreover, Cochrane confirms how the efficacy of real medicine is so robust that it can be tested in different ways: ‘Type of pain model, pain measurement, sample size, quality of study design, and study duration had no significant impact on the results.’ This is the sort of confident conclusion that emerges when a genuinely effective medicine is tested. Sadly, research into homeopathy has failed to deliver any kind of positive conclusion.

Conclusions

It has taken several thousand words to review the history of homeopathy and to survey the various attempts to test its efficacy, but the conclusion is simple: hundreds of trials have failed to deliver significant or convincing evidence to support the use of homeopathy for the treatment of any particular ailment. On the contrary, it would be fair to say that there is a mountain of evidence to suggest that homeopathic remedies simply do not work. This should not be such a surprising conclusion when we recall that they typically do not contain a single molecule of any active ingredient.

This raises an interesting question: with no evidence that it works and with no reason why it ought to work, why is it that homeopathy has grown so rapidly over the last decade into a multi-billion-dollar global industry? Why do so many people think that homeopathy works, when the evidence, frankly, shows that it does not?

One problem is that the public are unaware of the vast body of research that undermines homeopathy. While Linde’s original overly optimistic paper from 1997 is hyped on many pro-homeopathy websites, there are far fewer mentions of his more equivocal 1999 re-analysis of exactly the same data. Similarly, the even more important and more negative 2005 paper by Shang is often omitted from homeopathy websites.

Worse still, the public can be misled by news stories that show homeopathy in an unjustifiably sympathetic light. One of the most high-profile homeopathy news stories in recent years concerned a study by the Bristol Homoeopathic Hospital published in 2005. The hospital tracked 6,500 patients during a six-year study and observed that 70 per cent of those suffering with chronic diseases reported positive health changes after homeopathic treatment. As far as the public was concerned, this appeared to be an extraordinarily positive result. However, the study had no control group, so it was impossible to determine whether these patients would have improved without any homeopathic treatment. The 70 per cent improvement rate could have been due to any number of factors, including natural healing processes, or patients being reluctant to disappoint whoever was interviewing them, or the placebo effect, or any other treatments that these patients may have been using. Science writer Timandra Harkness was one of many critics who tried to point out why the Bristol study was largely meaningless: ‘It’s as if you had a theory that feeding children nothing but cheese made them grow taller, so you fed all your children cheese, measured them after a year and said There — all of them have grown taller — proof that cheese works!’