Homeopathy works so show us the money professor

This is one of the worst pieces of journalism I have ever read. the Daily mail does better. The "study" that he alludes to in Northern Ireland was NOT a trial, but merely a a customer satisfaction survey. It asked a lot of people if they felt better after seeing the alt med people. Some said yes. There was no com[parisin group at all. Studies like this not only fail to tell you whether homeopathy is better than placebo, they can't even tell you whether homeopathy has a placebo effect. They aren't worth the paper they are written on. It was done to promote the interests of a commercial company which is hoping to cream of some NHS money. In any case some good trials have already been done. It doesn't work and it's about time people stopped going on and on about it

Well David, the last thing we want to see is patient satisfaction, isn't it!

Perhaps David hasn't noticed - GPs came out very positively about the project.

I know its not selling drugs, David, but please, open you mind, if only a little!

David, I beg to differ, of the 5 meta-analyses of homeopathy trials published to date, 4 reported in favour of homeopathy while the last and only one to report results in disagreement with this, has recently been debunked in the scientific press, its results being statistically unsound (Lüdtke & Rutten, J Clin Epidem, 2008). So I turn it back to you, where is the evidence that it doesn't work?

Of course homoeopathy works. It works like magic. It works like a charm. It works, in other words, like a placebo. Yes, I imagine placebos might save the NHS money, but there is an ethical issue about prescribing them. To patients, especially if sending them to homoeopaths means that they then get homoepathic thinking on, say, not getting vaccinated - which could cause death and damage to the patient and others. Medicine has developed methods to test whether or not something works better than placebo, and these are the standards that should be applied. To win the money, you have to show that homoeopathy works, not like magic, but like medicine.

As a GP I am often pleasantly surprised by patients who specifically come to me because I prescribe homeopathic medicines. They have often had surprisingly good response to the medicine in the past and want more of the same. The same patients have not found conventional medicine has all the answers. I am a cynic but patients do know what works for them; perhaps we should be honest enough to listen.

It's a small point, but "It was done to promote the interests of a commercial company which is hoping to cream of some NHS money" is simply not true.

The service was delivered by Get Well UK, a non-profit organisation, established (by me) to make complementary therapies more available through the NHS. We are hoping to improve healthcare and save money for the NHS, rather than creaming money off. This service evaluation showed that these therapies did improve health and indicates resource savings for the NHS and other departments.

Having carried out several similar primary care studies into the effectiveness of homeopathy I can only congratulate the NI project on their results. What is interesting is that the results are very similar and this is so of several other studies. Despite David Colquhoun's fatuous and increasingly desperate comments, this is valid research and is adding to an increasingly strong body of evidence. Of course it does not fit with Mr Colquhoun's narrow view of science but most people have moved on from the drug trial model that he is so fixated on. Maybe there are other motives involved here?

When it comes to the health of human beings these "real life" studies are more valuable than the laboratory trials. There is nothing wrong in patients assessing if their treatment has worked or helped. After all it is the patient that is suffering not the techician.

It is about time Mr Colquhoun developed some compassion and the real definition of a true scientist which is to have an open mind and be a true observer without prejudice. The world would be a better place and suffering would be lessened. After all that is all we are trying to do in the end - help people to heal themselves.

I'm afraid I have to agree that Prof. Colquhoun is correct that this is poor journalism. For one thing, Prof. Ernst was very clear as to what sort of evidence would be acceptable for his 10,000. A review published in the Cochrane Collaboration would have to be strongly and conclusively positive about homeopathy. The study discussed here is essentially a consumer satisfaction survey: it suggests that some patients have positive experience of homeopathy. But it doesn't tell us why that is: it could be a placebo effect. That is, it doesn't tell us anything about whether homeopathy works. The standard of evidence provided is far lower than that demanded by Ernst. So I don't think that the 10,000 will be forthcoming.

Alexander Tournier makes the claim that the meta-analysis by Shang and co-workers, published in the Lancet in 2005, "has recently been debunked in the scientific press, its results being statistically unsound (Ludtke & Rutten, J Clin Epidem, 2008)". In fact, the conclusion of Ludtke and Rutten was only that in the Lancet paper the "conclusions are not so definite as they have been reported and discussed". Indeed, a reasonable alternative interpretation of Ludtke and Rutten is that it broadly supports Shang.

Well, Mr McLachlan before you pronounce your view on homeopathy you should get some things straight. Nowhere is it stated or has it ever been stated that homeopathy is against vaccination. There is no such thing as homeopathic thinking against vaccination. This is the kind of sensationalist, desperate language that is used to try to slander homeopathy. It is simply not true. Homeopathy has nothing to do with vaccination. Individuals may have their personal ideas but that is a different matter.

Also the idea that this sort of thinking can "cause death and damage to the patient" is another example of this hysterical narrow thinking. Does Mr Mclachlan not realise that the single biggest annual cause of death in the UK is the misuse, mistakes, and side effects of pharmaceutical drugs. It is estimated that it could be as high a figure as 100,000 per annum. In the US it is nearer to 400,000.

So lets get real and open our eyes to the real threat to our collective health - the pharmateutical industry. Lets stop pretending that it is all ok - people are suffering and dying in their thousands as a result of their incorrect and toxic treatments. But these drugs have all had "trials" so that makes it legal for them to contribute to so many deaths.

And the real reason why that is ok? PROFIT. GREED. SELF-INTEREST. Roger Neville-Smith is right - it is patients who know what works for them - let them decide - after all it is their taxes paying for all this "healthcare".

I wonder if I am the only person here with no financial interest in the outcome.

The homeopath, Steve Scrutton, naturally has to pretend his sugar pills work because otherwise he'd be out of a job.

If homeopaths restricted themselves the minor self-limiting conditions, it wouldn't matter too much. In fact time and time again they are caught out claiming they can cure malaria, cholera, dengue fever, and preaching against vaccination. Believing things that aren't true isn't harmless, It kills people.

After Newsnight caught out homeopaths recommending sugar pills to prevent malaria, a friend wrote an excellent blog post "The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing". The Society of Homeopaths didn't produce any evidence then sued his ISP to force the comment to be taken down. There is no more obvious sign that they don't give a damn about evidence.

Andrew Ward reveals the depth of his partiality with his last comment. And he is wrong about the reality of what homoeopathic practitioners tell people about vaccines and vaccination - survey after survey shows that lay homoeopaths are overwhelmingly and routinely anti-vaccination. So if that is just their "personal ideas", then the personal ideas seem to be shared by a vast number of their fellow practitioners. You can find some references in this article by Edzard Ernst.

The tired trick of dressing up a consumer survey: "Were you happy?" - and then claiming it offers some objective information (which it clearly doesn't) is a regular gambit of AltMed PR, as famously in the Spence et al survey published a few years back.

The only possible justification I can see for referring patients to folk remedy "practitioners" is the more cynical one, namely: "If we fob the mystically-inclined worried well off with this, they come back and badger the hard-pressed GP less often, so giving them the smoke and mirrors is saving us money"

Of course, the problem with this is primarily ethical, as Allo V Psycho points out above.

Oh how clever PhD Scientist must be, and how right he must be - he has a PhD after all. And David Colquhoun again in there ready to rubbish all homoeopathy as sugar pills, suggestive words and effectively, Mystic Meg.

Both wrong, as is "allo v psycho". So how do I know that homoeopathy works? After all I am not a "scientist" so must be ignorant and my observations count for nothing.

Ah, but then I did observe the effects of homoeopathic remedies administered to 300 cows plus 200 of their offspring (from baby calf to first-calving heifer) and my conclusion is that either the remedies worked or my cows are liars. Because we often observed extremely high levels of recovery from a wide range of illnesses, and response to other conditions.

Oh, and so do others, including fully qualified professional vets (scientists). If you check out www.hawl.co.uk Which do the cynical disbelievers think are lying - the animal or the human detractor?

Funny to how we don't see resistance from nasty illness creating bugs develope from using homoeopathy - unlike many drugs. Nor, to my knowledge, side effects that kill children and adults. Oliver Dowding Organic farmer, Shepton Farms

It seems that Allo v Psycho has all the answers regarding homoeopathy. It's merely placebo. Quite clearly its many successes are due to nothing more than those little sugar pills!

A question arises. With such a dismal record on the part of conventional medicine regarding the successful treatment of a whole swaithe of chronic illness, why don't the allopaths take a leaf out of the homoeopaths' book and resort to the placebo? Surely they have little to lose?