Evidence

... and other stories.

trying to assess how well something is working, particularly if we feel strongly about what it is that is being tested. So the better quality trials will be double blinded, in order that participants don't know whether they are getting the drug being tested or something else. They will be balanced and randomised correctly so that each group of patients which the drug is being tested on are a similar type of population and assigned to their group at random, not just say, in the order they turned up at the lab on the day of the test. A good trial will also have a control group which is to say that the drug under test will be compared with an inert placebo or the current drug of choice for the relevant condition rather just on its own.

2/ The randomised, double blind, placebo-controlled trial (RDBPCT) is not the be all and end all when it comes to testing drugs. Despite what is often claimed some drugs have an effect that is so obvious that there is no need for such a trial and a RDBPCT would be risky and unethical. To quote veterinary surgeon Dr Morag Kerr 'the randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial (RDBPCT for short) isn't by any means the "gold standard" test to be applied to every therapeutic intervention. It's quite pointless and indeed highly unethical to go through such an exercise for a self-evidently efficacious treatment. Imagine such a trial of insulin, for example! None has ever been done, nor will it be - and for exactly the same reasons, it will not be done on any insulin-substitute which might be discovered in future. No RDBPCT was done on trilostane, yet it was very quickly licensed. In fact the RDBPCT is the final arbiter of the NOT self-evident effect, where there is real doubt whether there is anything there at all. Unfortunately, nearly all "alternative" medicine is in that category, and certainly all of homoeopathy - if it were not, it wouldn't be "alternative"'.

3/ Homeopathy most certainly does NOT use "small doses of various substances" (for example - Jonas, 2003) to stimulate healing or anything else. The truth is that there is literally nothing whatsoever in homeopathic remedies - no active ingredients, just plain sugar, water or alcohol. Any original ingredient in all but a very few of the weakest remedies has been diluted out of existence until, literally, not a single molecule is left in the final product. Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying or knows so little about the subject as to not be worth wasting time with. To quote physicist Robert Park "there is simply no medicine in the medicine".

This section of the site presents some of the information about not only homeopathy but also other types of CAM which is bandied about by both sides of the argument in a central point and a way which is easy to access. You will find evidence in the form of citations and links to journal papers and clinical trials, some more general articles which are authoritative or of interest as well as being able to get a feel for popular opinion with links to on-line news items, blogs and web sites relating to CAM.

There are, as you might imagine, gazillions of works which have a connection with homeopathy and other types of CAM but obviously some are more reliable as sources of evidence than others. Some of the trial work is pretty obscure, while other papers (the 'usual suspects') seem to crop up again and again, quoted by CAM proponents as supposed proof their chosen modality is effective. Most of them have been refuted or don't actually say what the CAM proponents pretend they do and this has been pointed out as often as they have been presented but still they continue to be put forward as irrefutable proof that homeopathy or whatever is infallible. Presumably this is done in the hope that eventually people will come to believe what the homeopath says is true and stop actually reading the papers. Actually, it is very easy to refute all these claims, all you have to do is read the references, it doesn’t take a PhD, you don’t even have to own a white coat to be able to spot that most of the claims made of them are without foundation.

It takes time of course and that also is one of the tactics of the homeopathic evangelist - while you are doing the proper thing and actually looking at the evidence rather than taking their word for it the believers are accepting them as gospel on the say so of someone who sells sugar tablets to treat cancer, at the same time interpreting your caution as tacit

The Evidence

agreement. In all the years I have been looking at papers about homeopathy I have not found a single one which has been put forward in support of their argument which isn't either fatally flawed or simply does not say what the homeopaths claim (or both). They will selectively quote from parts of a paper while ignoring other, more significant portions thus making it appear that authors have said things which are actually the direct opposite of the actual conclusions. At the same time any trial which concludes that homeopathy is ineffective is either ignored or is attacked on bogus grounds such as being unhomeopathic or whatever regardless of how good the methodology is. This is known as 'cherry picking' - putting forward badly designed trials simply because they appear to support their preconceptions and selectively quoting other papers in an effort to 'spin' them as positive for homeopathy. Yet proponents are more than happy to quote papers which appear to the outsider as equally 'unhomeopathic', breaking multiple of the so called 'laws of homeopathy' so long as the findings support the idea that homeopathy works.

The idea behind this section of the web site is to allow people interested in the subject an easy way to follow up these references and look at the data itself as well as linking to relevant discussion of some of the 'usual suspects'.

When considering evidence in the form of trial data it is important to remember a few key points which homeopaths and others with similar, single agenda, outlooks usually choose to forget.

1/ The purpose of a trial is to test a theory, not to prove it. The scientific process at its best is a way of testing theories while correcting for all the problems of subjective assessment and cognitive bias that we are all prone to when

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