Unprotected Text – a second-year med student and blogger in the UK – offers a lively and spirited critique of homeopathy, which he says has no place in medical school.
“I personally believe that homeopathy is by and large a pile of shit,” he writes.
Is homeopathy breaking into traditional medical training under the guise of holistic medicine?
The blogger writes that a friend was “attached to a ‘doctor’ in Ayurvedic ‘medicine.’”
When the friend asked to change, the school claimed “that that the point was not to learn the medicine but its role in the multidisciplinary healthcare team.”
About Greg Baxter
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Jebus wept – this is how doctors are being trained these days?
Recent reearch has completely refuted a fallacious article that originally appeared in the Lancet which had stated that Homeopathy was no better than placebo. This conclusion, which reduced over 100 trials down to 8 by a series of arcane statistical manuevers and reasonings, is typical of the ineptitude, innendo and unscientific hysteria used to attack Homeopathy. For nearly 200 years, Homeopathy has been curing people, sometimes of dangerous, even deadly diseases and standard medicine has somehow managed to look the other way, attack it, ridicule it – anything but evaluate it – even when it proved itself superiour to standard medical treatments of the era during cholera epidemics.
The evaulation of Homeopathy is now proceeding, with far less funding than is available to massive pharameuctical companies and at a far slower pace. Again and again, even in double blinded randomized placebo controlled studies, the results show efficacy far above placebo. What is lacking is a theoretical basis for Homeopathy but the patient investigator who discovers the work of pharmaceutical researcher M. Ennis will be repaid with understanding that the research, still in its early stages, clearly points to the possibility of major breakthroughs once the theory is established. Ennis herself, originally performed her basophil experiments to repeat the work of a French researcher with whom she disagreed but she bravely admitted her astonishment at getting positive results and publsihed her results in Inflammation Research vol 53, p 181. The resarch has been confirmed by some, in International labs, even recently.
That’s an interesting, if mendacious, presentation of recent events, James Pannozzi. The article in the Lancet wasn’t fallacious, it was simply a report of the Shang metanalysis, which concluded that homeopathy doesn’t work significantly better than placebo. The Shang metanalysis didn’t use “arcane statistical manouevers and reasoning” to reduce the number of trials it looked at. According to Shang, it simply excluded all but the highest quality trials: those that weren’t sufficiently large, properly randomised or double-blinded. They were left with 8 homeopathy trials and 6 trials for conventional medicine. These were remedies for different conditions so they could not be compared with each other but they could be compared to placebo and the conventional medicine trials gave positive results and the homeopathy ones didn’t. That’s all.
Now Professor Lewith has criticised the Shang review for being opaque. He said, “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.” This is a legitimate criticism especially if people like you are going to make unsupported assumptions about why the number of trials was reduced. So the Shang team need to stop whatever they’re doing and provide more information.
Lewith also implies that smaller homeopathy trials give better results. The trials that homeopaths usually cite as showing positive results conclude that the results are merely ‘encouraging and further investigation is warranted’. What can further investigation mean but trying it out in a larger trial and making sure that the controls are as stringent as possible? But the larger trials on homeopathic remedies don’t show positive results do they? OK, make them smaller again!
Homeopathy has not been curing people for 200 years. It works as a placebo in some cases but it has never cured anyone of anything differently. Of course people in the homeopathic hospital did better than those in the conventional hospitals during the 19th cholera epidemics! Do you know what conventional medicine consisted of in the 19th century? Bloodletting, which we now know to be actively harmful and killed more people than it cured.
In the 21st century we have learned how to test medicine properly in large, randomised, placebo-controlled trials. A large fortune has been spent testing homepathy and yet in not one such has the efficacy of homeopathy been proven beyond all reasonable doubt.
Madeleine Ennis was indeed surprised at the result she found and she remained sceptical while urging further investigation be carried out. Last year, the BBC’s Horizon programme reported that a team of reputed scientists had failed to replicate her results. If you’re saying they’ve been confirmed, then I suggest you go edit the wiki article about Ennis and be sure to provide a full reference.
Homeopathy was created in response to the medicine of it’s time. It thrived BECAUSE of it’s positive results, with medical schools and hospitals being created with it’s principles. The AMA was founded when pharmaceuticals were created, as it was obviously going to be a great money maker and allopathic doctors wanted to create a way to eject Homeopathic doctors from the membership so that their drug driven model would survive. The research behind this push was funded by the man who became a millionaire from his chemical corporation. They then proceeded to shut down homeopathic medical schools and hospitals until it resurfaced again in this country.
Homeopathy is used around the world and thrives because of it’s success rate. If you want to talk about placebos then why not talk about how chemical medicine is really a placebo. At best it is used to alleviate or mask symptoms, but it is not a cure.
I grew up with severe asthma, on chemical medicines since age two. Doctors told my parents I’d be dead by age 30. A doctor killed by brother with chemicals at age 21. Both my parents were exposed to so many chemicals that they, too are dead, and died from long drawn out diseases. In 78, I decided to start looking for other answers, including homeopathy and because of the success from these alternatives, I outlived my entire birth family. My road to health hasn’t been easy because I was raised on chemical medicine.
Homeopathy looks to cause of illness rather than just treating symptoms, or cutting out the offending organ/gland.It would not have remained as successful as it is, nor be embraced from people across the world, including the royal family of England, if it was mere placebo.
Jem, I regret you are misinformed at several levels, probably the result of unthinkingly accepting popular news innuendo about Homeopathy without checking the facts.
The “Shang” metanalysis has been exposed for the inept research leading to invalid conclusions that it is in the following journal articles:
http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/studien/evidence_homeo...
“Due to a lack of funding, there are a limited number of homeopathic
studies. As a result, it is quite possible to interpret homeopathic
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 the trials were
reduced to 8 in one group and 6 in the other. Interestingly, the
quality of homeopathic trials was better than conventional trials.”
References
Lüdtke R, Rutten ALB. The conclusion on the effectiveness of
homeopathy highly depend on the set of analysed trials. Journal of
Clinical Epidemiology, 2008. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2008.06.015
Rutten ALB, Stolper CF. The 2005 meta-analysis of homeopathy:
analysis
of postpublication data. Homeopathy, 2008. doi:10.1016/j.homp.
2008.09.008.
With regard to your misinformed comments about the pharmaceutical researcher M. Ennis, current research has confirmed her research indicating high dilution (past the Avogadro limit) stimulation of histamine production by Basophil cells,
see the following references:
1: Lorenz I, Schneider EM, Stolz P, Brack A, Strube J.
Influence of the diluent on the effect of highly diluted histamine
on
basophil
activation.
Homeopathy. 2003 Jan;92(1):11-8.
PMID: 12587990 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
2: Sainte-Laudy J, Belon P.
Use of four different flow cytometric protocols for the analysis of
human
basophil activation. Application to the study of the biological
activity of high
dilutions of histamine.
Inflamm Res. 2006 Apr;55 Suppl 1:S23-4. No abstract available.
PMID: 16705375 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
3: Sainte-Laudy J, Boujenaini N, Belon P.
Confirmation of biological effects of high dilutions. Effects of
submolecular
concentrations of histamine and 1-, 3- and 4-methylhistamines on
human
basophil
activation.
Inflamm Res. 2008;57 Suppl 1:S27-8. No abstract available.
PMID: 18345504 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
4: Sainte-Laudy J, Belon P.
Improvement of flow cytometric analysis of basophil activation
inhibition by high
histamine dilutions. A novel basophil specific marker: CD 203c.
Homeopathy. 2006 Jan;95(1):3-8.
PMID: 16399248 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Regarding your misinformation about the BBC Horizon documentary, it occured in 2001. They used an unknown and then anonymous researcher who added a chemical which KILLS basophil cells thus ruining the experiment either by accident or incompetence. It took Ennis MONTHS of emails before the BBC producers finally admitted openly that they never intended to replicate her experiment and had, in fact, not done so.
The mythology about Ennis is widespread, but what is less known is that she remains sceptical of Homeopathy but bravely published her research, even when it gave unexpected positive results and asked others to confirm it – they did. The results remain unexplained.
If homoeopathy is only placebo, then conventional medicine has it horribly wrong in not being able to produce similar consistent results found in all good homoeopathic practices – give me the homoeopathic placebo anyday!