The Faculty of Homeopathy Offer Flawed Answers To Criticisms

September 6, 2009 at 8:17 pm (Homeopathy) (Faculty of Homeopathy, Homeopathy, Homoeopathy)

The Faculty of Homeopathy have released a document purporting to answer criticisms made of the therapy. [A Copy is available here as a PDF.] A blog named “The Great DBH Rant” has dealt with the response to criticism that homeopathy is “totally implausible with no basis in real science”. I decided to take a look at some of the other responses made by the Faculty of Homeopathy.

“They say: There is no clinical evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy. We say: There is evidence – take another look”

Personally, I doubt that critics really do say that there is no clinical evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy – I usually see the point made that the evidence of efficacy usually relied upon by advocates of homeopathy is poor. Larger, better-designed trials seem to be more likely to be negative than smaller, poorly-designed trials. The Faculty claims that there is a “good body of clinical evidence” and to back up this claim points to there being 138 trials, of which “60 [are] positive, 10 negative and 68 not statistically conclusive”. These numbers are meaningless – we have no indication of how well-designed any of these studies are or of how many trials have gone unpublished. If there were 60 small, poorly-designed trials that were positive and 10 large well-designed trials that were negative then the 60 positive trials could probably be safely ignored. They go on to claim that five out of six meta analyses “show homeopathy to have a greater effect than placebo”, but as AP Gaylard has pointed out in a piece on a recent ‘refutation’ of critics produced by Lionel Milgrom, there is a tendency among homeopaths “to accentuate the positive and ignore the caveats”. The meta analyses cited by Gaylard rightly point out that the evidence is not sufficient and future trials should be well-performed, rigorous, and systematic – which is a rather damning indictment of the current state of the evidence.

“They say: We now know homeopathy is no more than placebo
We say: No we don’t! One flawed study does not have the last word”

Oh dear, they’re talking about Shang being “flawed”. To support their claims regarding the ‘flaws’ in Shang et al, they cite two papers: Rutten & Stolper and Ludtke & Rutten. I refer you firstly to this: doi:10.1016/j.homp.2008.12.003 – the analysis by Rutten and Stolper contains misconceptions of Shang et al., contains some important errors, and does not show that the Shang et al. study was an invalid analysis. As for Ludtke and Rutten, their conclusion stated that “Our results do neither prove that homeopathic medicines are superior to placebo nor do they prove the opposite…it occurs that Shang’s conclusions are not so definite as they have been reported and discussed.” Their paper may have been titled “The conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy highly depend on the set of analyzed trials”, but the conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy *do not* highly depend on the set of analyzed trials, if an appropriate test is used. [Note: I’ve borrowed (very) heavily here from the Hawk/Handsaw blog: Rutten posts.]

“They say: Homeopaths mislead their patients and give them false hope
We say: Our critics appear to believe the public is gullible: they dismiss patient-reported outcome studies as an example of the placebo response”

Patients of homeopaths are not necessarily being characterised as gullible here – we are all placebo responders. The results of patient-reported outcome studies though – whether the Faculty likes it or not – are likely to be susceptible to the placebo effect. I’m not sure which patient-outcome studies the Faculty is referring to here, as no relevant citations of studies into homeopathy are given. The fact is, if homeopaths are telling patients that their remedies can help with their condition and the patient takes this to mean that the remedy is effective above placebo then they are being misled and given false hope – I don’t think that this is being done deliberately, I simply think that homoepaths are themselves misled (after all, “you are the easiest person to fool”; RP Feynman).

“They say: Hundreds of millions of pounds are wasted on homeopathy every year – we have seen a figure of £500M quoted!
We say: Homeopathy seems to be cost-effective and could save the NHS money“

For homeopathy to be cost-effective it would first have to be effective.

“They say: Homeopathy has no place in the NHS
We say: Homeopathy plays a vital role in the NHS by filling ‘effectiveness gaps’ and as a treatment option for patients who cannot take conventional medicines“

I do not wholly disagree with this. I think that in theory it is possible that homeopathy could have a place in the NHS – if it were the case that a placebo were helpful for some people with certain (self-limiting, non-serious) conditions. There are, though, a few obstacles for homeopathy to overcome. First, it is possible that people receiving homeopathy on the NHS would see this as a legitimisation of the treatment and would use homeopathy for more serious conditions (e.g. malaria prophylaxis). Secondly, there is an ethical dimension to this – David Colquhoun has written about the “lying dilemma”. Here, Colquhoun writes that: “The whole trend in medicine has been to be more open with the patient and to tell them the truth. To maximise the benefit of alternative medicine, it is necessary to lie to the patient as much as possible” (referring to the need to maximise the placebo effect by omitting to tell the patient that the treatment is inert*).

“They say: Homeopaths should not treat serious diseases like cancer
We say: In reality cancer patients are treated with conventional medicine; some also choose homeopathy and other interventions; others seek homeopathy to provide relief from side effects of cancer drugs“

Homeopaths should not treat serious diseases like cancer – or Aids, or malaria. The Faculty might prefer to believe that this does not happen, that conventional medicine is always provided to people who choose to use homeopathy for serious diseases, but this is clearly not the case. Take malaria prophylaxis as an example. Then there’s the homeopaths who advise against MMR vaccination, or propose an MP3 remedy for Aids: link.

“They say: Homeopathy is alternative, wacky and unregulated
We say: Homeopathy is a complementary medicine that is integrated alongside conventional treatments by medically qualified specialists“

Homeopathy is alternative in the sense that it is used as an alternative to real medicine that might actually work. It is wacky in the sense that believers in homeopathy think that a remedy that contains no active ingredient can still work – by somehow rectifying the disturbances in your “vital force” (and I haven’t even mentioned banging remedies on a leather-bound book to ‘potentize’ them). It is unregulated in the sense that there is no proper regulation of homeopaths. Associations seem to claim to regulate members, but their actions do not necessarily accord with their words. Nothing the Faculty says in their response to this criticism refutes the points made – homeopathy is wacky and it is an alternative medicine. Homeopathic doctors are statutorily registered with the General Medical Council – but this is only a specific group of the homeopaths practising in this country and you do not need to be registered with a regulator in order to practise as a homeopath.

More

I haven’t looked at the claim already covered by DBH and I have left the final claim for now – that conventional medicine is not the only medicine that can help patients. That, I think, deserves a blog post of its own. How many conventional treatments are known to be effective? I’ve seen several unreliable estimates and may investigate further in order to see whether there is some reliable information on this.

*Regarding the lying dilemma and maximising the placebo effect by omitting to tell the patient that the treatment is inert: “The primary finding is that patients can be willing to take placebo and can improve despite disclosure of the inert content of the pills” [Lee Crandall Park MD, link, download PDF.]

EDIT, 27th November: since writing this post, I have been reading more about the supposedly powerful placebo and I think that my comments above on placebo are perhaps more positive than the placebo effect warrants.