Deliberate deception

The discovery that 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.

The war against homeopathy

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.

Prejudice dressed up as science

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.

Homeopathy is 'extremely significant', says EU study everyone ignored

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.

The two big arguments against homeopathy

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.