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

We suggest that you ignore the occasional media hype and instead rely on our conclusion, because it is based on examining all the reliable evidence — and the evidence suggests that homeopathy acts as nothing more than a placebo. For this reason, we strongly advise you to avoid homeopathic remedies if you are looking for a medicine that is more than just make-believe.

Before ending this chapter, it is important to reiterate that we have come to our conclusions about homeopathy based on a fair, thorough, scientific assessment of the evidence. We have no axe to grind and have remained steadfastly open-minded in our examination of homeopathy. Moreover, one of us has had a considerable amount of experience in homeopathy and has even spent time practising as a homeopath. After graduating from a conventional medical school, Professor Ernst then trained as a homeopath. He even practised at the homeopathic hospital in Munich, treating inpatients for a whole range of conditions. He recalls that the patients seemed to benefit, but at the time it was hard to determine whether this was due to homeopathy, the placebo effect, the dietary advice given by doctors, the body’s natural healing ability, or something else.

Ernst continued to practise (and indeed receive) homeopathy for many years, remaining open to its potential. If homeopathy could be shown to be effective, then he and his colleagues would have been overjoyed, as it would offer fresh hope for patients and present new avenues of research in medicine, biology, chemistry and even physics. Unfortunately, as Ernst took a step back and began to look at the research into this form of medicine, he became increasingly disillusioned.

One key piece of research that helped to change Ernst’s view was conducted in 1991 by the German pharmacologist Professor W. H. Hopff, who repeated Hahnemann’s original experiment with Cinchona — according to Hahnemann, if a medicine that cured malaria was given to a healthy volunteer, then it would actually generate the symptoms of malaria. Using his own students as guinea pigs, the professor compared Cinchona with a placebo and discovered no difference. Neither positive nor negative. In short, Hahnemann’s results, which provided the foundation for homeopathy, were simply wrong. Such trials made it clear to Ernst that homeopathic medicines are nothing more than elaborate placebos.

Nevertheless, some readers might still feel that elaborate placebos are perfectly acceptable. You might feel that placebos help patients, and that this alone justifies the use of homeopathy. Some mainstream doctors sympathize with this view, while many others strongly disagree and feel that there are reasons why the placebo effect alone is not enough to justify the use of homeopathy in healthcare. For example, placebo treatments are not inevitably beneficial, and they can even endanger the health of patients. Even homeopathic remedies, containing no active ingredients, can carry risks. We will discuss the issue of safety in homeopathy and in relation to other alternative therapies at the end of the next chapter.

In the meantime, we will end this chapter by briefly considering another negative aspect of using placebo-based treatments such as homeopathy, namely the cost. This issue has been highlighted by Professor David Colquhoun, a pharmacologist who in 2006 criticized the sale of a homeopathic first-aid kit:

All the ‘remedies’ in this kit are in the 3 °C dilution. They therefore contain no trace of the substance on the label. You pay £38.95 for a lot of sugar pills. To get even one molecule you’d have to swallow a sphere with a diameter equal to the distance from the Earth to the sun. That is hard to swallow.

If a person is going to spend £38.95 on a first-aid kit, then surely it is better to spend the money on real medicines that are genuinely effective, as opposed to wasting it on fake medicines, such as homeopathy, which offer only a placebo benefit. Perhaps the most extreme example of a homeopathic rip-off is a remedy called Oscillococcinum. The following paragraph, which is from an article published in the magazine U.S. News and World Report in 1996, underlines the utter absurdity and profiteering that underpins the homeopathic industry: