Homeopathy Under Fire
Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is coming under remorseless worldwide pressure from the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CODEX) which is effectively a multinational pharmaceutical company trade group that wants 'regulation' of all CAM.
Their efforts to get homeopathy regulated or banned have so far resulted in several states in the US making the practice of homeopathy illegal and several others seeking to licence homeopathic medical doctors who will have to train at approved schools and will also be required to study 'conventional' pharmacology.
In the UK, the economic crisis and the cuts that need to be made in government spending have brought the public funding of homeopathic treatments under fire. This is in spite of the fact that the government currently spends less than 0.01% of its drug budget - £4m - funding homeopathic treatments on the National Health Service.
A hastily convened and poorly supported inquiry into the evidence base of homeopathy conducted in 2010 by the United Kingdom's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee concluded that homeopathy is no more effective than a placebo. And this opinion is shared by most UK doctors who recently passed a resolution at the British Medical Association's annual conference to stop homeopathy being made available on the National Health Service.
UK doctors are also demanding that homeopathic remedies be placed in a special area marked ‘Placebos’ in health shops and pharmacies. In fact, to make their point, protestors 'overdosed' on homeopathic remedies outside branches of a national chain of pharmacies.
Although doctors plainly believe that homeopathic remedies are just harmless sugar pills, they also feel that homeopaths may place patients at risk by promoting the use of homeopathic remedies over pharmaceutical drugs when it comes to preventing tropical diseases such as malaria or treating infections. They also take issue with most homeopath's stance on the relative risks and benefits of the vaccination programme.
What is homeopathy?
Homeopathy is a system of complementary medicine which involves treating the individual with highly diluted substances, given mostly in the form of sugar pills, with the aim of triggering the body's natural healing responses.
It was developed by the German physician, Samuel Hahnemann in 1796 and is based upon the axiom that 'like cures like' or what has come to be known as the law of similars or the similia principle. That is, that substances that provoke a similar symptom picture to a disease can be used to encourage healing.
Homeopathy uses animal, plant, mineral and synthetic substances in its remedies including, for example, arsenic oxide in Arsenicum album and thyroid hormone in Thyroidinum. Homeopathic remedies made from healthy specimens are known as sarcodes and those made from samples of diseased tissue such as urine or blood are referred to as nosodes.
The active substance is diluted repeatedly in a highly specific manner and then forcefully tapped in a process referred to as succussion between dilutions. Both these processes combine to potentise the remedies. This means that the higher the dilution the more potent the remedy is thought to be.
Hahnemann believed that the remedies were stimulating the individual's vital force, and causing it to neutralise and expel the disease. He first tried his remedies on healthy subjects getting them to extensively document any symptoms in a series of tests which came to be known as provings (from the German prüfung for test). For example, the homeopathic remedy Coffea is made from coffee and used to treat sleeplessness, agitation and even palpitations which are all recognised effects of excessive intake of caffeine.
At the first visit a homeopath will try to establish a picture of the patient's presenting symptoms, and their overall physical and psychological state. From the thousands of remedies available they will then select the most appropriate remedy with reference to texts known as homeopathic repertories and/or the Materia medica. Subsequent consultations involve discussing any changes in symptoms so that the homeopath can formulate the next stage of treatment.
Classical homeopathy generally involves using single remedies whereas clinical homeopathy involves using combinations of remedies to address the various symptoms of an illness.
Homeopathic remedies are almost without exception considered to be safe. Their great advantage is that they can be taken by pregnant and breastfeeding women, the frail and elderly and given to babies and animals. There are no unpleasant side-effects and they can also be taken in conjunction with other supplements and medications because they are working to promote healing.
Supporters say homoeopathy helps thousands of patients with chronic conditions such as CFS, asthma, migraine and depression who have often exhausted all the conventional medical treatment options. Homeopathic practitioners treat a wide array of mental and physical ailments although they may see more patients for whom allopathic treatment has been ineffective.
Homeopathic remedies are recognised in the directives of the European Union, by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as well as by the World Health Organisation. Some countries have no specific legal regulations concerning the use of homeopathy, whereas in others, licenses or degrees in conventional medicine from accredited universities are required.
Homeopathy damned: Edzard Ernst
In fact, a lot of the pressure that homeopathy is under in the UK has paradoxically been fomented by the first national chair of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. There was a lot of expectation when he was appointed at the Peninsular Medical School, University of Exeter by CAM practitioners who hoped that his appointment would give their field of endeavour some credibility. It was also taken as a sign that the UK was starting to embrace Integrated Medicine into the mainstream as has happened in other countries.
Ernst was brought up in a little village outside of Munich and was treated using homeopathy by the family GP as a child. He is quoted in the British Medical Journal as relating that as a young doctor he had an appointment in a homoeopathic hospital, and was very impressed with its success rate. His boss told him that much of this effect came from discontinuing pharmaceuticals and he reports that this made a big impression on him (BMJ 2003; 327:166). He claims to have had training in CAM although no record of this has been supplied and none can be found.
So initially the appointment looked promising. However, the honeymoon was over before it began as Edzard Ernst turned out to be one of complementary medicine's most vicious and prolific critics.
Scarcely impartial, he gave the keynote address to the 11th European Sceptics Congress in 2003. He has also called homeopaths and other CAM practitioners "liars" in an interview in the New Scientist and referred to homeopathy as being ".. worse than witchcraft" in The Daily Mail (10 May 2007).
"Homeopathy is .. placebo therapy at best and quackery at worst."
Dr Edzard Ernst, Arch Surg, 1998, 133 (11)
More recently, he co-authored a book with another sceptic, Simon Singh PhD, called Trick or Treatment. Having allegedly had an argument with an aid to Prince Charles who is known to use and be sympathetic to Integrated Healthcare in general and to homeopathy in particular, he dedicated the book to him. And then simultaneously launched a very effective publicity stunt by calling for publications from the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health to be withdrawn.
In an effort to explain how homeopathy can appear to be effective when he regards the remedies as ineffectual, Ernst offers the following alternative explanations:
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Spontaneous remission or recovery
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An unrelated change in diet or environment which occurred simultaneously
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The seeking of treatment when symptoms are at their worst, after which they may spontaneously improve
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Effective supplementation or allopathic treatment which may be wrongly attributed to the homeopathic treatment
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Being encouraged to suspend unpleasant allopathic treatment or pharmaceutical drugs with side-effects
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Changes in behaviour, lifestyle or diet as a result of the homeopathic consultations
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The placebo effect where the positive expectation of the patient manifests in improvements in health
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The reassurance and attention of the practitioner.
Homeopathic medicine: A paradigm shift
We cannot currently explain exactly how homeopathy works. Dr Samuel Hahnemann was undoubtedly a visionary who was centuries ahead of his time as is witnessed by the fact that his remedies are still in use.
However, modern technology and recent discoveries in the fields of quantum physics, energy medicine and the remarkable properties of water are providing possible mechanisms by which homeopathy may work.
Let us address the main points of contention with the allopathic community, one by one.
Energy fields
Allopathic medicine and science in general adheres to the Newtonian view of things as being separate physical objects and the universe and the body as essentially being machines in which parts can be fixed.
Whereas, the homeopath sees the universe and the body as an energetic whole in which everything is connected and where all living things are animated by an organising bioenergetic force.
It is this vital force, they maintain, that leaves the body at the point of death resulting in the immediate physical decline into chaos and decay. Homeopathy is seeking to address disease at this holistic energetic systems level rather than seeking to tackle individual physical symptoms using surgery or drugs. The homeopathic remedies are thought to work by rectifying underlying disturbances in the bio-energetic field using very highly refined vibrations.
This conceptual difference is enormous. The homeopath sees holism and energy and the allopathic doctor sees symptoms, body parts and biochemical reactions.
In recent decades the photographing of this energy field has become possible using technologies such as Kirlian photography and Polycontrast Interference Photography (PIP) as shown below.
The placebo effect
Critics claim that much of the beneficial effect of homeopathic remedies is due to the placebo effect. This is probably true. However, it has to be noted that up to 70% of the effect of pharmaceuticals is due to the placebo effect too. The placebo effect is incredibly powerful and it is hard to divorce from any objective effect any remedy may have.
The standard method of trying to tease out the real effect from the placebo effect is usually to conduct a double-blind randomised trial where neither practitioner nor patient know whether the remedy they are receiving is the substance being tested or a placebo.
However, even in this circumstance the interactions between practitioner and patient may be very different and certainly the patient's beliefs about the efficacy may be altered since they know that they are taking part in a trial and there is only a 50% chance that they are taking the active substance.
This alone, has to introduce an element of doubt rather than a conviction in the efficacy of the treatment. Also, we know from quantum physics that outcomes are altered by the beliefs of all concerned and so having a sceptic conducting the research will necessarily alter the outcome and some placebos may not be as inert as is imagined either.
Just some of the evidence to support homeopathy which can be considered to rule out the possibility of the placebo effect includes:
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Research on piglets by Irene Camerlink and her colleagues from Wageningen University in the Netherlands who found a highly significant reduction in the numbers suffering with E. Coli diarrhoea after prophylactic homeopathic remedies were used compared to the control group.
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EU funded research which showed homeopathic remedies to be 9 times more effective than controls in preventing mastitis in dairy cows.
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A study involving 2.3 million people in Cuba which found a highly significant impact of homeopathic treatments used to prevent Leptospirosis.
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Many laboratory in vitro studies demonstrating a beneficial effect on tissue specimens.
Dilutions used
Another big sticking point as far as allopathic medicine is concerned is that the dilutions used mean that potentially none of the original substance remains. This makes no sense to them using a biochemical model because, they argue, there is no active substance to have an effect.
In the biochemical model, more medicine must mean more effective, whereas the homeopathic view is that the more dilute - the more refined the energy - the higher the causative level of the bio-energetic field the remedies work at.
Although the protestors who demonstrated what they believed to be the ineffectual nature of homeopathic remedies by 'overdosing' plainly don't understand that conceptual difference!
The pharmaceuticals that we use are all toxic. In fact, they have to be to get a license. Therapeutic doses are calculated by working backwards from establishing the lethal doses that kill half of all experimental rats. This is known as the lethal dose 50 or LD50.
This happens because the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs block chemical reactions within the body as in anti-histamines or anti-inflammatory medicines. The problem being that they not only block the symptom the pharmaceutical is being taken to treat, but they will also block that chemical pathway throughout the body causing unwanted effects too. These are the side-effects that come as part and parcel of the pharmaceutical approach.
Homeopathic remedies work in a completely different way. One of their great advantages is that they are safe because they are working at an energetic rather than biochemical level.
I wonder if the protestors felt better the next day?
Whilst on the subject of dilutions, many vaccines are said to have no active ingredient in them and yet their effectiveness is not questioned by the allopathic community.
Research that supports the efficacy of high dilutions includes:
The law of similars
Last, but not least, we come to Hahnemann's assertion that 'like cures like'. This is actually already employed by allopathic medicine in desensitisation injections where tiny doses of allergens such as pollen are administered to de-sensitise allergic patients.
Bizarrely too, those exposed to small amounts of radiation after the atomic bomb explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually had a better health record than those with no exposure for reasons medicine cannot explain. So perhaps tiny amounts of an agent do have a protective or health promoting effect?
In addition recent research into the similia principle includes:
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Leoni Bonamin and Christian Endler examined research conducted over the last decade and identified 33 experiments, most of which were randomised, that showed a positive effect when a similar remedy was used.
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Fred Wiegant and colleagues at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found that rat hepatoma cells subjected to the appropriate homeopathic remedy demonstrated significantly different cell survival and protein production when compared to the results obtained when exposed to dissimilar remedies.
Research supporting homeopathy
Finally, some recent studies which support the efficacy of homeopathy generally include:
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David Naude and collaborators of Durban University of Technology, South Africa who found positively for homeopathy in randomised placebo-controlled tests.
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That eight out of nine meta-analyses and literature reviews have shown homeopathy to have a beneficial effect.
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A multinational group led by Christian Endler found that in 22 of 24 experimental models the results were reproducible which is also another requirement of 'hard' science.
Reflections on homeopathy
For a great while, most believed the Earth to be flat and to be the centre of the Universe. There was then the shocking realisation that not only was the Earth spherical, but that it was just one of many planets rotating around a distant star (our sun). Next came the discovery that our star was only one of billions. And all of these discoveries were treated with suppression and ridicule by the scientists of the time until undeniably proven.
It is not even necessarily that the earlier beliefs were wrong, they were often just incomplete.
And so it currently is with the human body.
We are on the verge of a mass paradigm shift to understanding the nature of the universe as being essentially energetic in nature - a mere 100 years after Einstein's famous equation E = mc2 undeniably proved it to be so.
“For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.”
Stuart Chase
Homeopaths are not just well meaning, but delusional. Most have studied homeopathy in maturity because they have either experienced the benefits of treatment first hand or witnessed recovery in others - often their children.
What drives them onwards is not the vast riches to be made (most CAM practitioners scrape by without the secure salaries and pensions of their allopathic counterparts), but the fact that they see real results every day.
Are all homeopaths knowledgeable and insightful?
Like doctors and all other humans - no. But the motivations of most are genuine.
The constant barrage of attacks on complementary and alternative medicines would not be so terrible were it not for the harm inflicted by allopathic medicine on many millions each year. This can be witnessed by the rate at which medicines are introduced and then found not only to be ineffective, but dangerous and withdrawn.
Can you imagine that any one of these drugs will have stood the test of time and still be in use over 200 years from now?
CAM practitioners understand that there are new perceptual frontiers to be crossed, and many fear that the modern day equivalent of the flat Earthers might win the day with their superior might and deep pockets. They understand that allopathic doctors can't understand their approach - a bit like trying to make someone see a 3i image when they don't want to.
They understand that they just don't get it, but they feel genuine concern that their gentle approach is going to be regulated out of existence leaving only the allopathic pharmaceutical options available.
Which is, of course, the outcome CODEX is campaigning for.
Further resources
For more about homeopathy refer to Homeopathic Research or the International Council for Homeopathy.
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