Swiss study throws cold water on homeopathic treatments
The study at Switzerland’s University of Berne, published in The Lancet, throws further doubt on the effectiveness of alternative medicines. Researchers ran comparisons between 110 randomised placebo-controlled trials of homeopathy with 110 conventional-medicine trials.
They covered a range of illnesses and treatments from respiratory infections to surgery to anaesthesiology.
The study concluded: “When the analysis was restricted to large trials of high quality there was no convincing evidence that homeopathy was superior to placebo, whereas for conventional medicine an important effect remained.”
Smaller, lower quality trials, in both groups, showed more beneficial effects than larger and higher quality trials, it also found.
This seems to show that homeopathy works if you really believe it, according to Professor Matthias Egger, of the Berne University’s Department of Social and Preventive Medicine.
“Our study powerfully illustrates the interplay and cumulative effect of different sources of bias,” he said.
“We acknowledge that to prove a negative is impossible, but we have shown that the effects seen in placebo-controlled trials of homeopathy are compatible with the placebo hypothesis.”
But scientists do not rule out the prospect of room for both approaches in modern-day 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.
“This does not mean that it is impossible to sift out which interpretation is more valuable.
“The ultimate proof is that science make progress in changing reality: in allopathic (conventional) medicine by preventing, alleviating, and curing disease ever more effectively.”
The study will feed the debate on homeopathic medicine’s effectiveness and safety amid warnings of a lack of evidence to back up many of its methods.
A third of European cancer patients already use alternative therapies to help fight their illnesses, according to European Oncology Nursing Society members.
The Lancet says: “It is the attitudes of patients and providers that engender alternative-therapy seeking behaviours which create a greater threat to conventional care - and patients’ welfare - than do spurious arguments of putative benefits from absurd dilutions.
“Now doctors need to be bold and honest with their patients about homeopathy’s lack of benefit, and with themselves about the failings of modern medicine to address patients’ needs for personalised care.”
