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Homoeopathy Benefits Could Be All in the Patient's Mind Study Questions Effectiveness of Treatment

Posted on: Friday, 26 August 2005, 09:00 CDT

THE power of homoeopathy is weak and produces nothing more than a placebo effect, a report has claimed.

The findings come after the Prince of Wales reportedly commissioned a study into how the government could save money by providing such treatments on the NHS.

Researchers at Berne University in Switzerland compared 110 placebo-controlled trials of homoeopathy with 110 conventional medicine trials.

The work covered illnesses and treatments ranging from respiratory infections to surgery.

The study, published in The Lancet, said: "When the analysis was restricted to large trials of high quality there was no convincing evidence that homoeopathy was superior to placebo, whereas for conventional medicine an important effect remained."

The team also found that smaller trials of lower quality, in both groups, showed more beneficial treatment than the larger and higher- quality trials.

Professor Matthias Egger, of the department of social and preventive medicine, said this seemed to show homoeopathy works if you truly believe in it.

He said: "Our study powerfully illustrates the interplay and cumulative effect of different sources of bias. We acknowledge that to prove a negative is impossible, but we have shown that the effects seen in placebocontrolled trials of homoeopathy are compatible with the placebo-hypothesis."

The Lancet said in its editorial: "Doctors need to be bold and honest with their patients about homoeopathy's lack of benefit, and with themselves about the failings of modern medicine to address patients' needs for personalised care."

Dr David Reilly, lead consultant at the Glasgow Homoeopathic Hospital, described the report as "biased commentary" with conclusions that failed to correspond with actual results.

"Both the homoeopathic and conventional trials showed a beneficial effect, although the conventional trial produced a stronger effect, " he said.

"This is fair enough, but to suddenly jump in with the shaky conclusion that homoeopathy is placebo doesn't match the data or results. This is not intellectually sound.

"The researchers seem to have come to these conclusions because the effect size is less in homoeopathy. But everyone knows conventional drugs are at best at short, sharp intervention - they get less effective long term."

Scientists are not ruling out the prospect that there is room for both approaches in modern medicine. Jan Vandenbroucke, of the Leiden University medical centre in the Netherlands, said: "Science is an intrinsically human affair. When new theories are created and new evidence sought, judgment will retain a subjective element."

Britons spend about GBP130m annually on complementary treatments. Estimates suggest this will top GBP200m over the next four years. A third of European cancer patients are also turning to alternative therapies.

Robert Wilson, chairman of Nelsonbach, a UK manufacturer of natural medicines, said:

"Despite this study's suggestion that the effects of homoeopathy are no better than placebo, there are many other studies that demonstrate homoeopathy's efficacy and safety in many disease areas."

LIKE WITH LIKE Contemporary Western homoeopathic medicine, based on the work of Samuel Hahnemann, the German physician and chemist, 200 years ago, aims to stimulate the individual's innate healing processes through the administration of minute "homoeopathic" dilutions of specific remedies.

Derived from the Greek homeo, meaning same, and pathos, meaning suffering, homeopathy essentially treats "like with like".

The patient describes his or her symptoms in detail, with equal emphasis placed on both physical and psychological symptoms. The practitioner then prescribes very small doses of a selected substance that, at higher doses, would produce the same symptoms in a healthy person.

Source: Herald, The; Glasgow (UK)

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