Meta Analysis and Homeopathy
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- Date Submitted: 02/19/2011 03:01 AM
- Pages: 10
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The effectiveness of homeopathy has been in dispute since its inception.
The publication of Hahnemann's Organon resulted in immediate controversy, even though homeopathy was used successfully to battle a number of diseases.
Today, homeopathy often comes under fire for being unscientific because it does not correspond to medical theories, e.g. the germ theory, the accepted theory that illnesses are caused by microorganisms.
But because of the still unexplained mechanism, controversy surrounds the actual integrity of this form of medicine. For example, depending on the dilution, homeopathic remedies may not contain any pharmacologically active molecules, and for such remedies to have pharmacological effect would violate fundamental principles of science
Trials are important. There are, in my opinion, enough high quality tests on the homeopathic treatment to counter the "placebo" theory. If the mechanism is something more complex than high school chemistry, it's up to the scientists to explain it.
In this essay I will analyse studies of homoeopathy devised to test whether homeopathic medicines have any clinical effect greater than placebo
Meta-analysis is most often used to assess the clinical effectiveness of healthcare interventions However meta- analysis always struggles with two issues: biases and the varying quality of the studies. John C. Bailar, in his response to letters regarding LeLorier et al. (1997), wrote: “My objections to meta-analysis are purely pragmatic. It does not work nearly as well as we might want it to work. The problems are so deep and so numerous that the results are simply not reliable. As it is practiced and as it is reported in our leading journals, meta-analysis is often deeply flawed.”
Ben Goldacre stated that five meta-analyses of homeopathy trials confirmed that the clinical effects of homeopathy are nothing more than placebo effects.( the Lancet,370,November 17 2007).His statement is...
The publication of Hahnemann's Organon resulted in immediate controversy, even though homeopathy was used successfully to battle a number of diseases.
Today, homeopathy often comes under fire for being unscientific because it does not correspond to medical theories, e.g. the germ theory, the accepted theory that illnesses are caused by microorganisms.
But because of the still unexplained mechanism, controversy surrounds the actual integrity of this form of medicine. For example, depending on the dilution, homeopathic remedies may not contain any pharmacologically active molecules, and for such remedies to have pharmacological effect would violate fundamental principles of science
Trials are important. There are, in my opinion, enough high quality tests on the homeopathic treatment to counter the "placebo" theory. If the mechanism is something more complex than high school chemistry, it's up to the scientists to explain it.
In this essay I will analyse studies of homoeopathy devised to test whether homeopathic medicines have any clinical effect greater than placebo
Meta-analysis is most often used to assess the clinical effectiveness of healthcare interventions However meta- analysis always struggles with two issues: biases and the varying quality of the studies. John C. Bailar, in his response to letters regarding LeLorier et al. (1997), wrote: “My objections to meta-analysis are purely pragmatic. It does not work nearly as well as we might want it to work. The problems are so deep and so numerous that the results are simply not reliable. As it is practiced and as it is reported in our leading journals, meta-analysis is often deeply flawed.”
Ben Goldacre stated that five meta-analyses of homeopathy trials confirmed that the clinical effects of homeopathy are nothing more than placebo effects.( the Lancet,370,November 17 2007).His statement is...