Celebrating homeopathy awareness week – PART 2

A nice way to conclude this year’s ‘homeopathy awareness week’, I think, is to review some of the more important homeopathy-related events from across the world that have been reported (on this blog) in the past 12 months.

1. A few weeks ago, it was reported that a master’s degree in homeopathic medicine at one of Spain’s top universities has been scrapped. Remarkably, the reason was “lack of scientific basis”. A university spokesman confirmed the course was being discontinued and gave three main reasons: “Firstly, the university’s Faculty of Medicine recommended scrapping the master’s because of the doubt that exists in the scientific community. Secondly, a lot of people within the university – professors and students across different faculties – had shown their opposition to the course. Thirdly, the postgraduate degree in homeopathic medicine is no longer approved by Spain’s Health Ministry.”
2. On January 30, a group of experts from all walks of life met in Freiburg to discuss ways of informing the public responsibly and countering the plethora of misinformation that Germans are regularly exposed to on the subject of homeopathy. They founded the ‘Information Network Homeopathy‘ and decided on a range of actions.
3. Earlier that month, the Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan called homeopathy ‘bogus’. “They (homeopaths) take arsenic compounds and dilute it to such an extent that just a molecule is left. It will not make any effect on you. Your tap water has more arsenic. No one in chemistry believes in homeopathy. It works because of placebo effect,” he was quoted saying.
4. We have confirmed that Dana Ulman (the ‘spokesman’ for homeopathy in the US) fails to understand science or medicine. He excels in producing one fallacy after the next. If he were on a mission to give homeopathy a bad name, he would be doing a sterling job!
5. I identified Prof Frass as one of the most magical of all homeopathy researchers: he never fails to produce a positive result with his placebos.
6. In an interview,  Christian Boiron, the general manager of the world’s largest producer of homeopathics, carried the debate about homeopathy to a new level of stupidity. He pointed out that “Il y a un Ku Klux Klan contre l’homéopathie” My translation: THERE IS A KU KLUX KLAN AGAINST HOMEOPATHY.
7. In a similar vein, Dr Michael Dixon, advisor to Prince Charles, defended homeopathy by stating that omitting it from the NHS “would be a mean-minded act of outside interference by many who do not treat patients themselves, denying patient choice and signifying a new age of intolerance and interference. It is a threat to the autonomy of general practice that should concern every GP and patient whatever their views on homeopathy.”
8. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences statement proposing the same scientific standards for homeopathic drug registration as for normal drugs Members of the Section of Medical Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) voted unanimously on 9 November 2015 for supporting the earlier proposal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Swedish statement requested that the homeopathic remedies should go through the same efficacy trials as normal drugs should.
9. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that they are considering whether advertisements for homeopathic products have any evidence to back the numerous claims that are being made for them. A meeting took place on 21 September, and the first details have emerged.
10. A legal challenge  in the UK failed to produce the results homeopaths had hoped for. Honor Watt, 73 had sued Lothian Health Board after the authority stopped in June 2013 to provide homeopathic treatments to patients. Ms Watt’s lawyers decided to challenge the board’s decision in the Court of Session claiming the health board acted illegally. There is reason to believe that Ms Watt was assisted by a professional organisation of homeopathy ( the judgement mentions that the Board’s submission stated that ‘the real force behind the petition was a charity, not the petitioner’). The case went to court and the judge, Lord Uist, ruled that the health board had acted legally. He therefore refused to overturn the board’s original decision. In a written judgement issued on Friday, Lord Uist confirmed that the health board acted correctly: “It is clear to me from an examination of the relevant documents that the board was from the outset consciously focusing on its PSED.”
11. The first International Conference on Homeoprophylaxis announce its guest speaker: ex-doctor Andrew Wakefield.
12. The Royal Pharmacy Society’s Chief Scientist Professor Jayne Lawrence has blogged on the history of homeopathy and asked why, even in the face of the lack of evidence, people are still actively seeking homeopathic treatment today. Jayne layed down a challenge to the profession: “… are we ready to remove homeopathy from the shelves of pharmacies?And here are the relevant passages from Jayne Lawrence’s post:…it is easy to see why homeopathy, with its use of ultralow doses of the treatment material, became so popular so quickly, despite the fact that a clinical trial performed as early as 1835 showed that homeopathy as a method of treatment was wholly ineffective.…for homeopathy to work as claimed, we would have to completely revise our understanding of science. Any scientific evidence claiming to support homeopathy has either been shown to be flawed or not repeatable under controlled conditions. Furthermore, systematic reviews of modern clinical trials have supported the first early clinical trial showing that homeopathy has no more clinical effect than a placebo…The public have a right to expect pharmacists and other health professionals to be open and honest about the effectiveness and limitations of treatments. Surely it is now the time for pharmacists to cast homeopathy from the shelves and focus on scientifically based treatments backed by clear clinical evidence.”
13. And finally, there is this impressive graph (published not by me but) by the formidable Nightingale Collaboration. It speaks for itself, I think:

NO, ONE CANNOT SAY THAT IT WAS A GOOD YEAR FOR HOMEOPATHY – BUT, PLEASE, LET THAT NOT SPOIL YOUR CELEBRATORY MOOD.