Wednesday 4 March 2015

Homeopathy does work

Homeopathy proven to be effective. 

A paper published in 'Systemic review Journal'  (click here for full text)  reviewed for the first time Randomised Controlled trials published in peer reviewed journals - comparing Homeopathic treatment vs placebo (dummy treatment).  They analysed 32 controlled trials involving 24 different medical conditions, and confirmed that Homeopathy worked.  To quote the paper:  "There was a small, statistically significant, treatment effect of individualised homeopathic treatment that was robust to sensitivity analysis based on ‘reliable evidence’."


The Forrest graph (see fig) shows all of these trials with the 'mean' and 'one standard deviation' for each trial and sum of results at the bottom.    For the majority of the trials the 'mean' was on the right of the vertical line showing benefit from homeopathy, with the sum (meta analysis) at the bottom confitming a definite statistically significant benefit from homeopathy.    Many drug trials do not have results better than these. 
Yet again in medicine, we need to appreciate that "just because we do not understand how a therapy works - does not mean that it is not effective".   To be brutally fair, at the cellular level, we have no idea how most drugs work either. 

No comments:

Post a Comment