Similia Vol 26 No 1 – June 2014

Author: Dr Isaac Golden

Introduction

The personal integrity of practitioners in all complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) modalities is regularly questioned (dispensing ‘worthless’ medicines), and the evidentiary base of their practice dismissed by some ‘medical scientists’. In Australia in 2012 a group of some 400 scientists calling themselves ‘Friends of Science’ signed an open letter calling for the removal of all CAM courses from Australian universities stating that by giving ‘undeserved credibility to what in many cases would be better described as quackery’ and by ‘failing to champion evidence-based science and medicine’, the universities are trashing their reputation as bastions of scientific rigour. To their credit, institution heads dismissed these demands, and some of the so-called ‘Friends’ withdrew their names from the list, once they became aware of the demonstrable non-science of the statement issued  under their names. More recently a decision by LaTrobe University to establish a unit researching CAM products has drawn similar non-science  criticism, highlighting the double standard of people who attack CAM for having an insufficient evidence base, then criticise structured efforts to  collect evidence.

Of all the mainstream CAM ingestive modalities, homeopathy attracts more than its share of criticism from non-scientists and sceptics, in part because the action of highly-diluted ‘potencies’ is regarded as being implausible (its mechanism of action is still to be established), in part because individual remedies cannot be patented and therefore offer few rewards to drug manufacturers, and in part because it is claimed that homœopathy lacks any substantial evidence base especially when compared to evidence-based pharmaceutical medicine.

The purpose of this article is to determine whether the evidence base of pharmaceutical medicine is superior to that of homeopathic medicine.  Fundamental flaws in orthodox research methodology and the resulting evidence hierarchy, combined with the fact that all aspects of pharmaceutical medicine are heavily influenced by corporations with poor institutional integrity, bring into question the intellectual rigour of evidentiary claims by medical scientists, and give context to their criticisms of the evidence-base of CAM in general, and homeopathy in particular.