A 2005 review in The Lancet titled ‘The End of Homeopathy’ reported what is patently obvious to any thinking person – that homeopathy is a farce and works due to the placebo effect.

The National Center for Homeopathy points out today, however, that the researchers must have borrowed some tricks from their opponents in neglecting to properly exercise the scientific rigor involved in good quality research.

It seems that shoddy research plagues both sides of the homeopathy debate.

The review compared six clinical trials of conventional medicine with eight of homeopathy but failed to properly include details of the trials examined. The review then concluded that there is ‘weak evidence for a specific effect of homeopathic remedies, but strong evidence for specific effects of conventional interventions’.

This then prompted the homeopathy proponents to somehow reconstruct the conditions of the Lancet review, ultimately ‘revealing’ that:

• Analysis of all high quality trials of homeopathy yields a positive conclusion.
• The 8 larger higher quality trials of homeopathy were all for different conditions; if homeopathy works for some of these but not others the result changes, implying that it is not placebo.
• The comparison with conventional medicine was meaningless.
• Doubts remain about the opaque, unpublished criteria used in the review, including the definition of ‘higher quality’.

The charge was that because actual scientific studies into the efficacy of homeopathy are so lacking, it was easy to pick and choose unfavorable ones to arrive at their desired conclusion of homeopathy being bunkum.

So, no doubt to the jubilation of the quacks out there, there is again hope that homeopathy may just be a miraculous cure that defies all conventional science and general common sense. The reinvigorated uncertainty is likely to strengthen the placebo effect, and once again people can go back to curing their hypochondria with sugar pills.

I can probably understand what drove the authors of the Lancet paper to be so lax in their method. It would all seem such a waste of time that the futility of it all started to get to them, and they started cutting corners just to get the thing finished.

Similar laxness was exhibited on the part of those conducting the peer review process and given that it’s taken three years to hear about this again, most of the scientific community. They just don’t care. How closely would you scrutinize a paper that sought to determine whether water really does run down hill?

But now look what you’ve done! You’ve inadvertently kicked an own goal for the side you wished to shut down once and for all. This new uncertainty will make the idiocy of homeopathy even more difficult to extinguish. Good job, guys.

References

• Lüdtke R, Rutten ALB. The conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy highly depend on the set of analyzed trials. J Clin Epidemiol 2008. doi:10.1016/j.jclinepi.2008.06.015
• Rutten ALB, Stolper CF. The 2005 meta-analysis of homeopathy: the importance of post-publication data. Homeopathy 2008. doi:10.1016/j.homp.2008.09.008