The International Council for Homeopathy wishes to respond to a number of errors and assumptions in the recent ill-informed pronouncement on homeopathy by Dr Ichiro Kanazawa, Chairperson of the Science Council of Japan (SCJ). His statement is clearly superficial in nature and shows he has made no effort to verify what he has said. ICH is the international council representing the homeopathy profession Worldwide and includes the Japanese Homeopathic Medical Association in its membership.
1) From the content of his statement SCJ has clearly not made any real effort to understand the nature of homeopathy or the pharmacological basis of its medicines. Statements such as ‘remedies (therapeutic medicines), which are soaked with ‘a kind of water’ show that he really has not made any effort to study and understand the way homeopathic medicines are prepared. They are prepared in a very specific manner according to pharmacopeia that have been developed and refined over the 200 years of homeopathy’s existence. Homeopathic medicinal products are an increasingly important part of the international health product market and are recognized in the directives of the European Union and by its member states, by the FDA in the USA as well as by the WHO (1).
2) SCJ states on the subject of the effectiveness of potentised nature of homeopathic medicines ‘Needless to say, this claim has no scientific basis and I call it such an absurd idea.” Unfortunately here too he shows he has not done his homework. Apart from a large numbers of studies from within homeopathy itself that verify the effects of high potency medicines (2-8), there are an increasing number of studies from other areas of science which show evidence of the effects of high dilutions (9-19).
3) He states ‘In past, there are articles to claim ‘homoeopathy has curative effects’, however, these articles were wrong and the results were same as placebo, in other words, it is mental effects and there is no scientific evidence of curative effects in later verifications.1 and quotes an article in the Shang et al. (20) that has been much quoted by the sceptics of homeopathy, but which in fact has since been shown to be a deeply faulted piece of research, biased in its methodology by its already sceptical authors (21-22).
Most recently a study involving a population of 2.3 million people in Cuba recorded a highly significant impact of homeopathic treatments used to prevent Leptospirosis (23). Do they really want to insist that a homeopathic medicine that was routinely prescribed across a whole population without the individualised case-taking of each person had some sort of mass placebo effect?
4) SCJ also quotes the report of the House of Commons, Science and Technology Committee report of earlier this year (24). This report was the result of a hastily mounted enquiry initiated by a sceptic MP in the UK Parliament. It was carried out and written up in a deeply faulted and highly biased fashion such that it was only ever going to produce the result that the sceptic MP wanted. The final report was eventually signed off by just 3 MPs, two of whom did not even participate in the enquiry process, and it was not even debated or endorsed by the full UK Parliament. The UK Government quite rightly, while acknowledging the report, did not act on its recommendation to exclude homeopathy from the NHS (25).
In conclusion: Thousands of medical doctors around the World are turning to homeopathy and integrating it into their daily medical practice because it helps many patients for whom conventional medicine does not provide a satisfactory answer to their health problems. Additionally, a new profession of the homeopath, trained in homeopathy as a discrete healthcare discipline, has appeared and developed over recent decades in response to the growing patient need.
Rather than trying to simply sweep homeopathy aside in the uninformed way SCJ has appeared to do in this statement, SCJ would be well advised to actually engage with the patients who are benefiting from homeopathic treatments and with the growing numbers of medical doctors and practitioners who are treating them to try to understand why its popularity is growing and to understand how it works. In this way they may come to understand that homeopathy can work alongside and with conventional medicine in order to give patients a broader range of effective options for their healthcare.
21 September 2009
Individualised homeopathic treatment found at least as effective as fluoxetine in patients with depression
A new study has found individualised homeopathic treatment to be at least as effective as fluoxetine in the treatment of patients with moderate to severe depression. Patients on fluoxetine suffered more side-effects from their treatment than the homeopathy patients. Ninety-one outpatients with moderate to severe depression were assigned to receive an individualized homeopathic medicine or fluoxetine in a prospective, randomized, double-blind double-dummy 8-week, single-centre trial. This study illustrates the feasibility of randomized controlled double-blind trials of homeopathy in depression and indicates the non-inferiority of individualized homeopathic Q-potencies as compared to fluoxetine in acute treatment of outpatients with moderate to severe depression.
Reference: Homeopathic Individualized Q-potencies versus Fluoxetine for Moderate to Severe Depression: Double-blind, Randomized Non-inferiority Trial U.C Adler et al eCAM, doi:10.1093/ecam/nep114
For access to the abstract and full article:
http://ecam.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/nep114v1