Homeopathy and the medical establishment - the shocking truth
If you use homeopathic remedies for yourself and your family, you'll know that they work.
Despite this, some doctors keep repeating the mantra: 'there's no evidence for homeopathy'. The most recent attack came from a group of 13 scientists and doctors, led by Professor Michael Baum, who urged the National Health Service to stop wasting money on 'an implausible' therapy that had never worked in any trial.
So how is it that homeopathy works for you, and for thousands of others?
Most doctors put it down to the ‘placebo effect’ – you think it is going to do you good. But the real reason is far simpler, as researchers at What Doctors Don’t Tell You (WDDTY) claim to have found – we’re just not being told the truth about homeopathy.
WDDTY investigators claim to have uncovered scores of major studies into homeopathy that all prove just how effective homeopathy can be, research that was ignored by Baum and colleagues.
The war against homeopathy
The WDDTY research team claim that evidence had been tampered with or rejected to such an extent that it ceased to be science, and instead smacked of an agenda to finally kill off homeopathy as a genuine alternative to mainstream medicine.
The lancet study
According to WDDTY, in Autumn 2005, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published a study that was so damning of homeopathy that the cover read ‘The End of Homeopathy’. Beneath it, it told doctors that they ‘need to be bold and honest with their patients about homeopathy’s lack of benefit’.
Of course, this made national news – and no doubt many people were influenced by it. Sadly, most journalists took the story at face value, but there was another story to tell.
The Lancet’s strident headline was based on a meta-analysis that reviewed 110 clinical trials in homeopathy. All the trials were of a high quality and were scientific, the researchers agreed. The majority of trials found that homeopathy worked or had ‘a beneficial effect’, as the research team put it.
Prejudice dressed up as science
However, the researchers decided to reject 102 of these trials from their final analysis. Eight of the ‘rejects’ were trials on patients with upper respiratory tract infection that had such positive results in favour of homeopathy that they could not be ‘trusted’.
So, the researchers were already convinced that homeopathy didn’t work, and so rejected trials that proved otherwise. In fact, they said so. When they set out to research homeopathy, they viewed it as ‘implausible’ say WDDTY.
After weeding out all the positive studies, they were left with just eight trials – and all of them 'proved' homeopathy didn't work.
It's strange that the press and doctors have latched on to The Lancet study, and ignored the many other major studies that had found in favour of homeopathy.
other studies of homeopathy
The first major study took place 16 years ago at Limburg University in Holland. It was a two-year study that analysed the findings of 105 clinical trials – and, of these, 81 found homeopathy worked.
Eight years later, researchers from Munich University analysed 89 trials into homeopathy and concluded that it was more than 'twice as good' as placebo, which makes it as effective as any pharmaceutical drug.
Homeopathy is 'extremely significant', says EU study everyone ignored
The European Commission carried out its own research programme in 2000, and with even more rigorous standards. In the end they found just 17 out of 118 clinical trials that they felt were properly scientific – and, from those 17 trials, concluded that homeopathy had an 'extremely significant' effect.
Perhaps the most impressive trial in terms of size was carried out by the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital in Bristol, England. They studied the progress of 23,000 patients between 1997 and 2003, and found that 70 per cent reported 'clinical improvement'.
More impressive still, most patients had tried homeopathy only after conventional medicine had failed them. In other words, these were people with the most difficult, intractable health issues. The biggest effect was among children, 80 per cent of whom reported a positive improvement from conditions such as asthma, eczema, and depression.
The two big arguments against homeopathy
Homeopathy's critics always cite two arguments:
- the science behind it is 'implausible', and so therefore it's impossible for it to work
- any good effects are all in the mind
disproving the placebo effect
Taking the second argument first, homeopathy is very effective when given to animals, as studies have demonstrated, which demonstrates that the placebo effect is not an issue after all.
In one, pregnant pigs were given a homeopathic remedy to stop stillbirths. In the homeopathic group, the rate of stillbirths fell to 30 per cent compared to an 80 per cent rate in the control group that was not given homeopathy.
In another study of mastitis in cows, those who had a homeopathic remedy added to their water had a 3 per cent rate of mastitis compared with 48 per cent in those not given the remedy.
implausible science?
The first argument is subtler still. Effectively it states: 'It's impossible for homeopathy to work, so therefore it doesn't'. Prof Colin Blakemore of the UK's Medical Research Council has stated: "If we were to accept the principles of homeopathy we would have to overturn the whole of physics and chemistry."
Precisely.
As you may know, science works according to 'paradigms'. Anything that adds to, or supports, an existing paradigm is accepted as science; that which refutes it is rejected as ‘unscientific’. In other words, science is a self-defining system.
It was implausible that the Earth should revolve around the Sun, as Galileo claimed, or that time was not an absolute, as Einstein demonstrated. In medicine, it was ‘implausible’ that a bug called helicobacter pylori could cause ulcers, or that folic acid could prevent neural-tube defects, but they did, and eventually the paradigm shifted.
But there’s a much bigger game at stake if we are to accept homeopathy as an effective therapy. It would mean that the way we treat people is wrong, that we do not truly understand disease, and indeed that human beings are not the mechanical pieces of flesh and bone that some doctors and the drug companies believe us to be.
