I had all but forgotten about these trials until a comment by ‘Mojo’ (thanks Mojo!) reminded me of this article in the JRSM by M.E. Dean. It reviewed these early trials of homeopathy back in 2006. Here are the crucial excerpts:
The homeopath in both trials was a Dr Herrmann, who received a 1-year contract in February 1829 to test homeopathy with the Russian military.3 The first study took place at the Military Hospital in the market town of Tulzyn, in the province of Podolya, Ukraine.4 At the end of 3 months, 164 patients had been admitted, 123 pronounced cured, 18 were convalescing, 18 still sick, and six had died. The homeopathic ward received many gravely ill patients, and the small number of deaths was shown at autopsy to be due to advanced gross pathologies. The results were interesting enough for the Russian government to order Herrmann to the Regional Military Hospital at St Petersburg to take part in a larger trial, supervised by a Dr Gigler. Patients were admitted to an experimental homeopathic ward, for treatment by Herrmann, and comparisons were made with the success rate in the allopathic wards, as happened in Tulzyn. The novelty was Gigler’s inclusion of a ‘no treatment’ ward where patients were not subject to conventional drugging and bleeding, or homeopathic dosing. The untreated patients benefited from baths, tisanes, good nutrition and rest, but also:
‘During this period, the patients were additionally subjects of an innocent deception. In order to deflect the suspicion that they were not being given any medicine, they were prescribed pills made of white breadcrumbs or cocoa, lactose powder or salep infusions, as happened in the homeopathic ward.’3 (page 415)
The ‘no treatment’ patients, in fact, did better than those in both the allopathic and homeopathic wards. The trial had important implications not just for homeopathy but also for the excessive allopathic drugging and bleeding that was prevalent. As a result of the report, homeopathy was banned in Russia for some years, although allopathy was not.
… A well-known opponent of homeopathy, Carl von Seidlitz, witnessed the St Petersburg trial and wrote a hostile report.5 He then conducted a homeopathic drug test in February 1834 at the Naval Hospital in the same city in which healthy nursing staff received homeopathically-prepared vegetable charcoal or placebo in a single-blind cross-over design.6 Within a few months, Armand Trousseau and colleagues were giving placebo pills to their Parisian patients; perhaps in the belief that they were testing homeopathy, and fully aware they were testing a placebo response.7,8 A placebo-controlled homeopathic proving took place in Nuremberg in 1835 and even included a primitive form of random assignment—identical vials of active and placebo treatment were shuffled before distribution.9 Around the same time in England, Sir John Forbes treated a diarrhoea outbreak after dividing his patients into two groups: half received allopathic ‘treatment as usual’ and half got bread pills. He saw no difference in outcome, and when he reported the experiment in 1846 he added that the placebos could just as easily have been homeopathic tablets.10 In 1861, a French doctor gave placebo pills to patients with neurotic symptoms, and his attitude is representative: he called the placebo ‘orthodox homeopathy’, because, as he said, ‘Bread pills or globules of Aconitum 30c or 40c amount to the same thing’.11
References:
28 Responses to The early trials of homeopathy
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Dean’s article and his book proves, without doubt, that when skeptics of homeopathy conduct research on the subject, they cannot be trusted to do good research or even to do honest research or to simply report on what happened in the study.
This problem is very similar today, especially in the skeptics reporting on research.
It is interesting to note that Russia banned homeopathy for a couple of years even though it performed as well as allopathy and was a lot safer. I can’t help but wonder if the apothecaries of the day had a MAJOR influence on Russian politics (a lot like Big Pharma does today!). In fact, the next paragraph provides evidence of this:
Two of Grand Duke Constantine’s brothers, Grand Duke Mikhail and Emperor Nicholas I (1796–1855), also became interested in the new medicine called homeopathy. Emperor Nicholas, who later became Czar Nicholas, was known personally to influence many physicians to study it, and he never went into the country without his case of homeopathic medicines. But even the emperor, gifted with unequaled force of character, with an iron will, and with all of the power of his position, still could not, as Dr. Carl Frantz Von Villers said, break down “the Chinese wall by which the medical hierarchy surrounds its domain” (Historical and Statistical Report, 1876).
“when skeptics of homeopathy conduct research on the subject, they cannot be trusted to do good research”
I think, Dana, that in your book ‘good research’ is research that generates a positive finding.
I have never seen you criticize a study – however flimsy – that reported a positive result.
Indeed. The laughable tosh that Dana repeatedly cites to support his faith in Magic Water is an ongoing source of wonder. It is explained to him why it is tosh and yet the same papers get brought out and waved around time and again. And then it’s the same excuses to explain a negative result, although these never apply of a result is notionally positive (i.e. Frass and his serial exercises in fatuous data-mangling)
He never learns.
Mr Ullman, please name a laboratory that can distinguish homeopathic water from other water, a thing which in this BLog you said “only fools or liars” doubted could be done.
Fifty-sixth time of asking.
Here’s a good study from a Harvard professor and several others. You might actually learn something.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28133653/
Ooh. Dana’s cited a “study”. Pull up chairs, folks. This’ll be fun.
So, Dana. Where in that piece concerning nanomedicine is homeopathy mentioned?
You continue to fancifully imagine that homeopathy is nanomedicine. It isn’t, despite your pathetic and petulant stamping and shouting.
Find me a piece in a nanomedicine journal that states otherwise. You’re the one making the claim, kiddo, It’s up to you to prove it. You can’t. You’re an irrelevant clown, Dana.
Mr Ullman, thank you for posting the link to that interesting study about protein coronas.
Now please name a laboratory that can distinguish between homeopathic water and other water.
Fifty-seventh time of asking.
Please confirm that you’ve read the article…and please let me know what you’ve learned from it.
As yet, you’ve never confirmed that you’ve read any article that I’ve posted to you. And now, I will continually insist that you tell me what you’ve learned. Without learning, what’s the purpose of reading?
Mr Ullman, please name a laboratory that can distinguish between homeopathic water and other water, which you said in this Blog “only fools or liars” doubted could be done.
Thank you.
Fifty-seventh time of asking.
Ok Dana, Ok. I work with specific nanoparticles and was interested enough to read the article, which by the way is a non-comprehensive review article and not a study. Still, an interesting read. And one that does nothing to address the question asked by DavidB.
Trying to extract relevance from that article, if you are suggesting that protein nucleation around a nanoparticle acts as a concentrating mechanism that might somehow increase the effect of a dilute homeopathic remedy, well then that rather argues that the homeopathic “memory of water” is not the primary mechanism for homeopathic remedies. Furthermore, it still requires that there is a measurable amount of material in the homeopathic preparation, making it potentially pharmacologic in nature and not truly homeopathic, i.e. a molecule/receptor interaction, standard science. So, for C3-C7 there might, potentially be a realistic molecular effect from a homeopathic preparation, but no magic, no succussion or potentization, just good old regular pharmacology. So, is it nucleation or memory of water? Can’t have both.
Beyond about C10/C11 molecular interaction with biological efficacy is theoretically possible but unlikely due to the low number of dissolved molecules, but let’s take C12 as a standard homeopathic dilution you mention on your website (diluting… 3, 6, 12, 30, 200…https://homeopathic.com/why-homeopathy-makes-sense-and-works/). At C12 there is statistically less than a single molecule present in the solution. So no amount of nucleation around nanoparticles could possibly happen making the “study” you posted irrelevant. But also bringing us to DavidB’s question.
So let me re-write DavidB’s question: Please show us a single study that distinguishes a C12 or C30 homeopathic preparation in water from other water.
I doubt you’ll answer this.
Dana will now wibble about Chikramine and Langmuir..
There’s some soon-to-be-published work which pisses on Chikramine’s work from a great height. Will it shut Dana up?
Nope. Nothing ever does.
Dana is desperate to find something which will explain how magic shaken water works. Unfortunately he has been unable to demonstrate that it does work. Because it doesn’t. This has been explained to him. Repeatedly and beyond doubt. He, of course, will not accept this because he is a blinkered zealot. He also believes that his evangelical promotion of homeopathy will have an effect in increasing its acceptance as a legitimate therapy. It has not and will not because science has shown him to be wrong. He is an insignificant crank.
On what basis do you conclude that homeopathy “was a lot safer”? According to Dean, “the general mortality in the allopathic wards was the same as under homeopathy”. (Dean, The Trials of Homeopathy, PhD thesis 2001, p 110)
@Dana Ullman
Strange … because from my perspective, it is research done by homeopaths and believers in homeopathy that can’t be trusted – usually for the rather mundane reason that the overwhelming majority of homeopaths is wholly incompetent in science in general and medical science in particular. Which is to be expected, given among other things that they believe that the best way to test their ‘medicines’ is to administer them to healthy (not sick) people.
And yes, you too have demonstrated your scientific incompetence lots of times, in various ways.
HaHaHa! It is totally hilarious (!) that you question my statement that homeopathic medicines are SAFER than allopathic drugs of the 19th century?
It is super funny to watch “seemingly” smart people who say with a straight face that 19th century allopathic drugs were as safe as homeopathic medicines.
You obviously are not honest with yourself or with anyone else…and you’ve now shown the world how embarrassing you are. Thanx…
I don’t have to do an ad hom…you’ve done it all by yourself
@Dana Ullman
?? I’m afraid that there is a problem with your reading skills – I didn’t say anything like that. My comment was about the general quality of scientific research and competence among homeopaths – including you.
In fact I tend to agree with you on this one: generally speaking, early 19th century homeopathic ‘medicines’ were indeed much safer than regular ‘medicines’. The reason to use quote marks for both is that neither of them were proper, effective medicines.
Homeopathic preparations were nothing but water, and thus inherently harmless but also useless, while regular ‘medicines’ were rather worse, as they often contained harmful ingredients. Some legitimate ‘medicinal ingredients’ still found in pharmacopoeias in the late 1700s were for instance poisonous substances such as mercury, and even extremely infectious stuff such as dog poo and moss grown on a corpse’s skull.
In my opinion, the very reason why homeopathy initially became popular was because it was far less harmful than regular medicine of the day – it simply boiled down to doing nothing instead of bleeding and poisoning patients to death. No-one of course realized this at the time, as medical scientific research was of a truly appalling quality, both for regular medicine and homeopathy.
However, regular medicine started making huge progress from the 1850’s onwards, while homeopathy stubbornly stuck with its old, unscientific beliefs. As a result, homeopathy gradually became obsolete, as it turned out that its fundamental ‘laws’ not only remained unproven, but were increasingly at odds with increasing scientific knowledge. Which is why I consider homeopaths scientifically incompetent, as they still keep rejecting lots of long-established scientific principles in order to maintain their old beliefs.
Yes, Dana, we all know that 19th-century medicine was worse than useless, and that homeopathy was safer because it doesn’t actually do anything, but you were writing in the context of the Russian government banning homeopathy in 1830.
You wrote:
You wrote this in the context of a trial which found that homeopathy performed as badly as allopathy. On what basis could the Russian government have concluded that homeopathy was a lot safer?
H-I-S-T-O-R-Y!
You might try considering learning something about this word. “The accumulation of experience” seems to be not in your vocabulary.
The experience from Russia is simply further evidence of powers-that-be that are much much larger than science having an impact on politics and on medicine…and the powers-that-be are economic powers.
M-O-N-E-Y. You might learn something about this word and how it leads to corruption, not science or healing.
The Russian government didn’t have the benefit of 190 years of accumulation of experience. All they had was what was in front of them, with homeopathy performing as badly as 19th-century medicine.
Your “even though it … was a lot safer” implies that they should have taken this into account. How could they have known it?
I know, I read the Lancet article about the boom in homeopathy in India you linked to on the other thread.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607617097/fulltext
Here you will find some other homeopathic trial and comments.
Interstingly a trial with mustard gas diluted in bencene and its effekt on the skin, but waslater given per os.
https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/?s=homeopathy
The article shows that there was a placebo given to half the group, and we must assume that the level of pathology was the equivalent in both groups.
But how do we know from what is written whether the group treated “homeopathically” got appropriately prescribed medicines that where actually homeopathic to their condition?
Garbage in to the study, garbage out. But thanks for trying. I think even you, EE, can see the problem in these studies. Maybe you dont care because the seem to prove your theme?
They were treated by a homeopath who had, in an earlier uncontrolled trial, obtained results that were “interesting enough” for the Russian government to order the controlled trial we are discussing. Are you suggesting that Dr Herrmann was incompetent?
Obviously, we know now that he was incompetent because, despite not using the harmful treatments of the time, he managed to kill as many patients as the allopaths. But what basis do you have for suggesting that he was not prescribing appropriately, given that even appropriately prescribed homeopathy is useless?
The pseudoscientific method as illustrated by ‘stan’:
P1: silent a priori premise that individualized homeopathy is effective (which is nothing other than the wanted conclusion used as a silent premise).
P2: if individualized homeopathy is administered appropriately then it is effective (as per silent P1).
P3: homeopathy group did not fair better than placebo group.
C: therefore homeopathy was not administered appropriately.
And don’t worry if a group of superb homeopaths manages to conduct a state-of-the-art clinical trial, that fails to demonstrate efficacy, they can invoke, for example, Organon aphorism §260 to explain the failure:
And cellphones, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Marvellous!
I’ve seen homeopathy described as “a system of excuses masquerading as medicine”.
§260 Organon was written by Guru Hahnemann himself. Nowadays we will find almost no situation in daily life where according to Hahnemann could show efficacy.
Wanking stops homeopthic remedies from working?
unnatural debauchery?
Does that mean if I take homeopathic “remedies”, I cannot participate in orgies?
Now I have to cancel all those orgies I schedules for the month of March. Damn you Hahnemann!
It seems that only “unnatural debauchery” was proscribed, not debauchery. Perhaps it is a mistranslation of the original, and/or, it refers to what was at the time and locale, illegal/unlawful.
Of course, if you go to an orgy in a “heated room”, you might get a double whammy, so to speak, of aphorism §260.