WDDTY
e-News Broadcast - 5 July 2006
The shocking truth about
homeopathy and the medical establishment
Research discovers doctors are not telling the truth to
patients
You probably use homeopathic
remedies for you and your family, and so you know they work. Despite this, doctors keep repeating the
mantra: 'There's no evidence for it'.
The most recent attack came from
a group of 13 scientists and doctors, led by Prof 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 come it 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) have uncovered –
doctors just aren’t telling us the truth about homeopathy.
In a special research project,
WDDTY investigators 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.
Worse, the WDDTY research
team discovered that evidence had been tampered with or rejected to such an
extent that it ceased to be science, and instead smacks of an agenda to finally
kill off homeopathy as a genuine alternative to mainstream medicine.
Last autumn 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, the journalists, as always, took the
story on 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.
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'.
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. 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.
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.
Homeopathy's critics always cite
two arguments: that the science behind
it is 'implausible', and so therefore it's impossible for it to work, and any
good effects are all in the mind.
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.
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 doctors and drug companies
believe us to be.
The full WDDTY research is now
available in print. It is found in the
latest issue of What Doctors Don't Tell You, and it's the first issue you will
receive as a new subscriber.
What Doctors Don't Tell You is a
vital health journal for every individual who cares about his or her health and
wellbeing. It has quite literally saved
the lives of hundreds of readers, and improved the health of thousands of
others. No wonder The Observer
newspaper called it 'the best health journal in the world'.
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Alternative Views on Health