Is homeopathy really a "pseudoscience"?

Wikipedia asserts that "Pseudoscience is a claim, belief or practice which is falsely presented as scientific, but does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting scientific evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status."

The "editors" at Wikipedia have deemed homeopathy to be a "pseudoscience" even though randomized double-blind and placebo-controlled studies that have been published in many of the best medical journals in the world have shown efficacy of homeopathic treatment for many common and serious health problems (below is a partial list of such studies):

• Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: Frass, M; Dielacher, C; Linkesch, M; et al. "Influence of potassium dichromate on tracheal secretions in critically ill patients." Chest. March, 2005;127:936-941. The journal, Chest, is the official publication of the American College of Chest Physicians. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.


• Hayfever: Reilly, D; Taylor, M; McSharry, C; et al., "Is homoeopathy a placebo response? Controlled trial of homoeopathic potency, with pollen in hayfever as model." The Lancet. October 18, 1986, ii: 881-6. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.


• Asthma: Reilly, D; Taylor, M; Beattie, N; et al., "Is evidence for homoeopathy reproducible?" Lancet. December 10, 1994, 344:1601-6. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.


• Fibromyalgia: Bell, IR; Lewis II, DA; Brooks, AJ; et al. "Improved clinical status in fibromyalgia patients treated with individualized homeopathic remedies versus placebo." Rheumatology. 2004:1111-5. This journal is the official journal of the British Society of Rheumatology. http://rheumatology.oxfordjournals.org.


• Fibromyalgia: Fisher, P; Greenwood, A; Huskisson, EC; et al., "Effect of Homoeopathic Treatment on Fibrositis (Primary Fibromyalgia)," BMJ. 299(August 5, 1989):365-6.


• Childhood diarrhea: Jacobs, J; Jimenez, LM; Gloyd, SS. "Treatment of acute childhood diarrhea with homeopathic medicine: a randomized clinical trial in Nicaragua." Pediatrics. May, 1994,93,5:719-25. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.


• ADD/ADHD: Frei, H; Everts, R; von Ammon, K; Kaufmann, F; Walther, D; Hsu-Schmitz, SF; Collenberg, M; Fuhrer, K; Hassink, R; Steinlin, M; Thurneysen, A. "Homeopathic treatment of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a randomised, double blind, placebo controlled crossover trial." Eur J Pediatr. July 27,2005,164:758-767. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

Jimmy, can you name ONE other system of "pseudoscience" that has a similar body of randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled clinical trials published in high-impact medical journals showing efficacy of treatment?

It is more than a tad ironic that this first paragraph in the Wikipedia article on homeopathy references only one article that was published in a peer-review medical journal. This one article by Shang, et al. has been thoroughly discredited in an article written by Ludtke and Rutten that was published in a leading "high-impact" journal that specializes in evaluating clinical research. The Shang meta-analysis is highlighted on Wikipedia without reference to any critique of it. The fact that there is no hint of any problems in the Shang review, let alone a reference to the Ludtke and Rutten article that provides evidence of bias, is itself a cause for concern.

The Shang article is also the primary reference used by the widely ridiculed "Evidence Check" reports issued by the Science and Technology Committee of the British House of Commons, which also conveniently omits reference to the severe limitations of this one review of research. Further, the "Evidence Check" was signed off by just three of the 15 members of the original committee, never discussed or endorsed by the whole UK Parliament, and had its recommendations ignored by the UK Department of Health.

It should be made clear that the Shang meta-analysis was co-authored by M. Egger, who is a well-known skeptic of homeopathy and who wrote to The Lancet that his hypothesis before conducting the review was that homeopathy was only a placebo effect. Readers were never informed of this bias.

The meta-analysis by Shang evaluated and compared 110 placebo-controlled trials testing homeopathic medicines with 110 testing conventional drugs, finding 21 homeopathy trials (19%) but only nine (8%) conventional-medicine trials that were of "higher quality." Ludtke and Rutten found that a positive outcome for homeopathy would have resulted if Shang had simply compared these high-quality trials against each other. However, with some clever statistical footwork, Shang chose to limit the high-quality trials to only eight homeopathic and six conventional medical trials, a result that led to a "negative" outcome for homeopathy. Ludtke and Rutten determined this review as biased for its "arbitrarily defined one subset of eight trials" and they deemed the entire review as "falsely negative."

By reducing the number of studies, Shang created convoluted logic that enabled his team to avoid evaluation of ANY of the above high-quality studies that were all published in respected medical journals. Further, seven of eight homeopathic studies only tested one homeopathic medicine for everyone with the similar disease even though one of the primary tenets of homeopathy requires individualization of treatment. Many other extremely scathing critiques of the Shang research were published in The Lancet shortly after publication, including the exclusion of one high-quality homeopathic study due to the questionable assertion that the researchers could not find a study in all of conventional medical research that treated patients with polyarthritis (arthritis that involves five or more joints).

Skeptics typically assert that the above high-quality studies published in high-impact medical journals are simply "cherry-picking" the positive studies, and then, they begin cherry-picking studies that had negative results. However, skeptics of homeopathy fail to differentiate good, sound scientific investigations that are respectful of the homeopathic method and those that are not. Just because a study was conducted with a randomized double-blind and placebo-controlled method does NOT mean that the study gave the appropriate homeopathic medicine for each patient or even each group of patients. This ignorance is akin to someone saying that antibiotics are ineffective for "infections" without differentiating between bacterial infections, viral infections and fungal infections. Ironically, skeptics of homeopathy consistently show a very sloppy attitude about scientific investigations.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/047630_Wikipedia_academic_bias_homeopathic_medicine.html#ixzz3NHTclHPw