Phoenix Homeopathy

Stephen Gordon, the General Secretary of the European Council for Classical Homeopathy, asks that the following information be made known:

“Two new studies conclude that a review which claimed that homeopathy is just a placebo, published in The Lancet, was seriously flawed.

George Lewith, Professor of Health Research at Southampton University comments: ‘The review gave no indication of which trials were analysed nor of the various vital assumptions made about the data. This is not usual scientific practice. If we presume that homeopathy works for some conditions but not others, or change the definition of a ‘larger trial’, the conclusions change. This indicates a fundamental weakness in the conclusions: they are NOT reliable.’

The background to the ongoing debate is as follows:

In August 2005, The Lancet published an editorial entitled ‘The End of Homeopathy’, prompted by a review comparing clinical trials of homeopathy with trials of conventional medicine. The claim that homeopathic medicines are just placebo was based on 6 clinical trials of conventional medicine and 8 studies of homeopathy but did not reveal the identity of these trials. The review was criticised for its opacity as it gave no indication of which trials were analysed and the various assumptions made about the data.

Sufficient detail to enable a reconstruction was eventually published and two recently published scientific papers based on such a reconstruction challenge the Lancet review, showing that:

• Analysis of all high quality trials of homeopathy yields a positive conclusion.
• The 8 larger higher quality trials of homeopathy were all for different conditions; if homeopathy works for some of these but not others the result changes, implying that it is not placebo.
• The comparison with conventional medicine was meaningless.
• Doubts remain about the opaque, unpublished criteria used in the review, including the definition of ‘higher quality’.

The Lancet review, led by Prof Matthias Egger of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Berne, started with 110 matched clinical trials of homeopathy and conventional medicine, reduced these to ‘higher quality trials’ and then to 8 and 6 respectively ‘larger higher quality trials’. Based on these 14 studies the review concluded that there is ‘weak evidence for a specific effect of homoeopathic remedies, but strong evidence for specific effects of conventional interventions’.

There are a limited number of homeopathic studies so it is quite possible to interpret these data selectively and unfavourably, which is what appears to have been done in the Lancet paper. If we assume that homeopathy does not work for just one condition (Arnica for post-exercise muscle stiffness), or alter the definition of ‘larger trial’, the results are positive. The comparison with conventional medicine was meaningless: the original 110 trials were matched, but matching was lost after they were reduced to 8 and 6. But the quality of homeopathic trials was better than conventional trials.

This reconstruction casts serious doubts on the review, showing that it was based on a series of hidden judgments unfavourable to homeopathy. An open assessment of the current evidence suggests that homeopathy is probably effective for a number of conditions including allergies, upper respiratory tract infections and ‘flu, but more research is desperately needed.

Prof Egger has declined to comment on these findings.

References

Lüdtke R, Rutten ALB. The conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy highly depend on the set of analyzed trials. J Clin Epidemiol 2008. doi:10.1016/j.jclinepi.2008.06.015

Rutten ALB, Stolper CF. The 2005 meta-analysis of homeopathy: the importance of post-publication data. Homeopathy 2008. doi:10.1016/j.homp.2008.09.008.”

After (rather inaccurately, in my view - click the research tag) announcing ‘the death of homeopathy’ recently, The Lancet is at it again, publishing another article that fails to give readers a balanced view of modern homeopathy. No wonder more and more people are asking: is this the latest in a series of attempts to repress homeopathy in the UK?

Here’s the Society of Homeopaths’ response to the Lancet article, which makes interesting reading:

Letter to the Editor of The Lancet

Dear Sir

We read your Special Report on homeopathy in Britain (Vol 370) with interest. For a publication that bills itself as the world’s leading medical journal, we were surprised that Udani Samarasekera’s report merely rehashes time-worn arguments, without presenting any new information to your readers.

As you know, we provided you with a six-page set of responses to questions posed in connection with this report. We find it fascinating that not one of those responses was actually printed.

To better inform your readers, we would like to point out that The Society of Homeopaths is the largest professional organisation registering homeopaths in Britain, representing more than 2,300 members overall. We are committed to fostering an integrated, patient-centred approach to health and wellness, treating each person’s symptoms as unique and each person’s care as an individual programme.

Society registered homeopaths have satisfied The Society’s educational and professional requirements and agreed to practise in accordance with The Society of Homeopaths’ Code of Ethics & Practice, the Core Criteria for Homeopathic Practice and the National Occupational Standards for Homeopathy.

We concur with our colleagues across the medical profession that proper regulation is essential to delivering integrated, patient-centred care and we welcome increased regulation of the homeopathy profession. In fact, it is something that we, as the leading professional organisation, have been advocating for years.

Kind regards,

Paula Ross
Chief Executive

Society of Homeopaths
11 Brookfield, Duncan Close, Moulton Park, Northampton NN3 6WL
Tel: 0845 450 6611 Fax: 0845 450 6622 Email: info@homeopathy-soh.org

Earlier today, the University of Connecticut Health Center in the US hosted a historic debate on homeopathy. The event marked the first time that a major US medical school has examined this subject in this depth. It also marks the first time that the clinical, historical and basic science data has been examined simultaneously.

Beginning with a speaker who argues that homeopathy is implausible, and continuing with a discussion of recent investigations into the nature of water, the debate continues with intelligent and articulate arguments for and against homeopathy, including a final presentation arguing that consistently-suppressed historical records demonstrate that homeopathy has been spectacularly effective in reducing mortality rates in epidemics of infectious diseases, including pneumonia and influenza.

You can view the recorded debate online.

Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Please remember that homeopathic remedies should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing.

Whether you’re generally healthy, but are tired all the time (what doctors call ‘TATT’), or you live with a more serious disorder like chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), it can be extremely hard sustain energy throughout the day. CFS, of course, encompasses many more symptoms than fatigue: sufferers often cope with brain ‘fog’ or poor recall, dizziness, muscle pain and so on.

For those without CFS who are tired all the time, it’s worth considering the possible effect on our system of the day-to-day demands we place on ourselves. Human beings evolved over millenia to cope with sudden, short bursts of stress (much like when a wild animal flees from sudden danger), but our body chemistry just hasn’t had time to evolve to cope with the long-term, daily stress like that experienced day-to-day in a busy metropolis. No wonder that homeopathic remedies like Phos-ac, Sepia and Adrenaline, which can all help with worn-out states, are prescribed so frequently in the Phoenix Homeopathy clinic.

Possible causations for the fatigue that can be part of a CFS symptom-picture also vary: for some CFS patients with fatigue, a history of repeated vaccination may be implicated. Other patients report that candidasis (which may be linked to so-called ‘leaky junctions’ in the gut, and to connected food intolerances) may be the culprit. Sometimes contact with toxic chemicals (including pesticides or mercury from dental amalgams), parasites in the system, or lingering or past viral infections (like flu or glandular fever) are suspected. With other patients, long-suppressed emotions may be causing havoc to the body’s subtle energies, and may need to be acknowedged, felt, appropriately expressed and released. No wonder hard-pressed GPs (doctors in general practice) sometimes struggle to help CFS-related fatigue and related symptoms!

Working out why energy levels or stamina have dropped can therefore be a tough task, but a randomised double-blind trial involving 62 patients with energy-sapping ME found that 33% of patients in the group receiving homeopathic remedies showed definite improvement compared with none in the placebo group (Awdry R. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 1996; February, March, April).

And in a triple-blind randomised controlled trial of 86 patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, patients in the homeopathic medicine group showed clinically significant improvement with significantly more improvement on fatigue, compared to patients receiving placebo (Weatherley-Jones E, Nicholl JP, Thomas KJ, Parry GJ, McKendrik MW, Green ST, Stanley PJ, Lynch SPJ, A randomised, controlled, triple-blind trial of the efficacy of homeopathic treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome, Journal of Psychosomatic Research 56 (2004) 189-197).

Fortunately for homeopathy patients, although an understanding of the possible causes of each individual patient’s chronic fatigue and related symptoms can be very helpful, homeopathy concentrates on information from the patients themselves. Appropriate homeopathic remedies are carefully chosen for each separate patient, based on that particular patient’s experience of their particular symptom-package.