Irish Homeopaths Serving the Homeopathic Community in Ireland

The Bristol homeopathic hospital has released the results of a study into the effectiveness of Homeopathy which canvassed 6,500 patients with chronic conditions finding that 75% of them felt better after homeopathic treatment. The results among children were even more impressive.

Read about it on the BBC website.

The criticism against this study from the authors of The Lancet meta-study are that there are no comparison cases and that most people will respond "better" to their doctors when asked how they feel.

It is this last point which I find reasonably typical and echoes what Paul O'Donoghue said on the Late Late show a few weeks ago. It is the presupposition that patients are not to be trusted when they say they feel better. The implication is that patients are not qualified to give themselves a report on whether they have improved or not. This notion is a good example of how conventional medicine, whether wittingly or not, can disempower patients. It says to patients "we don't trust you to know for yourself whether you're better or not. We don't believe you until we've run our own tests and examinations. We will decide for you if you are better, since we are more qualified than you to do so."

There are plenty of reasons to suspect that the "inevitable" bird 'flu pandemic will go the way of the SARS scare. The virus may never make it out of the bird population into mammals and to say that it is about to is still a matter of increasingly wild speculation. Despite the fact that the human to human form of the disease doesn't even exist people are still talking about making vaccine for it. Meanwhile governments fill the coffers of pharma companies and we all get distracted from natural disasters, war and the price of oil.

Let's suppose for a moment that the threat is real and imminent. What homeopathic remedies can help you out? Well, it turns out that Helios in the UK are recommending Oscillococcinum as the remedy to prevent and treat such an outbreak.

There has been a crescendo of bird 'flu stories and warnings building up over the past six years, ever since the Hong Kong outbreak 1998. In 1999 The Guardian called it "The Plague in Waiting" and there are several expert blogs providing insight and commentary on the H5N1 strain of avian flu, to give it its full title. The WHO has dedicated much of its website to the disease.

I thought you'd like to read this excellent article from last Tuesday's Irish Times health supplement in defense of Alternative Therapies.

It's by Shalini Sinha, a presenter on RTÉ's "health squad". She was on the late late that night on which they had the debate on alternative medicine just not on that bit. She was talking later on the panel about immigration.

The Bigger Picture

This is the second of two articles on the antagonism between orthodox and complementary healing.

While there are distinct philosophical, indeed religious, differences between allopathy (the practice of our GPs and doctors in hospital) and "complementary" practices, they do not explain the intensity with which allopathic medicine can attack other healing perspectives.

Another positive article from the Irish Times Health supplement, published on Tue, Sep 13, '05.
Link to original article (subscription required)

Homeopathic solutions to learning problems

Parents of children with behavioural difficulties are turning to homeopathy. Elaine Keogh reports.

Parenting is frequently enjoyable but rarely easy and for parents of children with additional learning needs or behavioural problems, the prospects that alternative or holistic treatments could benefit the children are often as welcome as orthodox ones.

This article is a point for point rebuttal of the Lancet article, released by the Society of Homeopaths. Thanks to Gerry Murphy for forwarding it to me.

It is available online at the Society's site.

There is also an extensive press release page with many article summaries here. It includes contributions from Vithoulkas and Sankaran.

When Ghandi was employing passive resistance against the British, he came up with the following: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win".

The fact that homeopathy is getting so much flak these days is paradoxically because it has been so successful. The second most practiced form of medicine in the world and the same in Europe, recognised by the WHO and with a history of over 200 years it's a little more resilient than many pharmaceutical companies would like.

The press have loved this latest meta-study. The sound counter-arguments put forward by homeopathic companies doctors and associations in the US and Europe have been virtually ignored. The researchers in the Lancet took 114 studies and whittled them down to just eight "scientifically valid" studies on Homeopathy, which just happened to employ methodologies specifically designed to test allopathic drugs. It dismissed the other studies as "biased" (pot = kettle = black) and completely overlooked the fact that Homeopathy is a completely different system of medicine, not fitting into the criteria of allopathic medicine. They were not comparing like with like, yet insisted on proceeding. Why so much noise over such flimsy evidence?

The newswires are abuzz today with the publication of the latest report from "The Lancet", a very prominent medical journal, entitled "The End of Homeopathy". It is not a new study, but rather a review of 8 clinical trials into the effectiveness of Homeopathy.

They appear to have been quite selective, since most of the trials are based on double-blind placebo methodology which assumes that homeopathic medicines work like allopathic ones, in that there are specific remedies for specific diseases. However, homeopaths know that this isn't so and that they are not comparing like with like, since homeopaths treat the whole person and not the specific disease.

This appeared today in response to last week's skeptical article on Homeopathy

Letter: With reference to an article by Paul O'Donoghue of the Irish Skeptics Society (Health Supplement, July 5th), the Irish Society of Homeopaths queries his views on some of the issues.

We agree it is good to take a sceptical approach, particularly to the vast array of potentially confusing health information that people are subjected to these days from conventional and complementary sectors alike.

However, Mr O'Donoghue focuses solely on homeopathy in this article, as he has continually done so in the past, claiming it is not scientific.