Homeopathy is bust, it doesn’t really do anything, it’s just a make-believe treatment. Why do I have to write another article debunking it? Well, because people still buy it. People are still tricked by non-medics non-scientists into using “treatments” which are just a placebo. Homeopathy lacks biological plausibility and the axioms of homeopathy have been refuted for some time; and guess what ? Yet another study concluded the same thing.
Homeopathic remedies are no better than a placebo. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
The draft paper by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) assessed research into the effectiveness of the alternative medicine on 68 health conditions and concluded “there is no reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective”.
The basic principle behind homeopathy is fairly simple, and sounds logical (which is perhaps why it’s so successful despite no scientific basis). The main idea is to “let likes treat like” – you give the patient highly diluted forms of the ailment it is treating, basically “training” the body against a weaker enemy to defeat the actual disease.
The review showed that homeopathy had no impact on a range of conditions and illnesses including asthma, arthritis, sleep disturbances, cold and flu, chronic fatigue syndrome, eczema, cholera, burns, malaria and heroin addiction. Basically, for all the 68 diseases which were studied, the effects were similar to that of a placebo.
“No good-quality, well-designed studies with enough participants for a meaningful result reported either that homeopathy caused greater health improvements than a substance with no effect on the health condition (placebo), or that homeopathy caused health improvements equal to those of another treatment,” read the report’s summary.
Not really surprisingly, doctors hailed the achievement – they want real treatments, not make-believe.
“Obviously we understand the placebo effect. We know that many people have illnesses that are short lived by its very nature and their bodies will cure them, so it’s very easy for people to fall in the trap that because they did ‘A’, ‘B’ follows,” said Professor John Dwyer, an immunologist and Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of New South Wales.
As he explains, one of the biggest problems occur when homeopathy is used instead of vaccines.
“In my point of view as an immunologist, the most serious issue was the spreading of the concept that homeopathic vaccinations were harmless and just as good as orthodox vaccinations. People who believe that are not protecting themselves and their children,” he said.
So there you have it – yet another study, yet another piece of evidence, all indicating the same thing – homeopathy doesn’t work.
