Although some people say homoeopathy is safe and leads to better outcomes when used along with conventional medicine, others say it can be harmful, reports livescience.com.
Like cures like?
Homoeopathy is based on the idea that “like cures like”, meaning that diseases can be treated with substances that would produce symptoms in healthy people that are similar to the symptoms of the disease. (Such as deadly nightshade for cold and flu, or poison ivy for rashes.)
Supporters of the practice also believe that the substances used in treatments should be diluted, because lower doses of a treatment are actually more potent. But this means that many homoeopathic remedies are diluted so much that not a single molecule from the original “active” substance would remain, according to the National Institutes of Health. As such, any ideas that homoeopathic treatments could actually work to treat sick people “fly in the face of science”, said Dr Edzard Ernst, an emeritus professor at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who studies complementary medicine.
The placebo effect
Controlled studies tend to show that outcomes for people who receive homoeopathic treatments are indistinguishable from those of people who receive placebos, Ernst wrote in the July 14 issue of the BMJ. Still, because there isn’t any active substance present in homoeopathic treatments, they are unlikely to cause serious harm, Ernst said.
Arguments for
In fact, Peter Fisher, director of research at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine, argues that homoeopathic treatments can improve patient outcomes. Fisher, who wrote a counterpoint to Ernst’s arguments, also published in the BMJ, points to several studies that suggest that patients who use homoeopathic treatments along with conventional medicine have better outcomes than those who don’t. For example, one study with 450 patients who had acute upper respiratory problems, including allergies, found that after two weeks, 82 per cent of homoeopathic patients had no symptoms, compared with 68 per cent of patients who used conventional medicine.
Other studies have found that patients who use homoeopathic treatments tend to use less antibiotics and nonsteroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs, said Fisher, who also serves as editor in chief of the journal Homoeopathy.
But Ernst argued that homoeopathic treatments can still be harmful if they are used in place of an effective therapy. “Nobody can say how often they have caused actual harm to patients; anecdotally, however, I know of several deaths that have occurred in this unnecessary way,” Ernst said. “The ultramolecular homoeopathic remedy might be harmless, but the same cannot be said for all homoeopaths,” he said. The National Institutes of Health also says that there is little evidence to support homoeopathy as an effective treatment, and that some products that are labeled as homoeopathic can actually contain active ingredients that could cause side effects and drug interactions.
Source: www.sciencealert.com
