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Doing harm in homeopathy – seven good reasons why we should not experiment on animals By Delny Britton, SA
Biog
Delny studied at the British School of Homœopathy and the Dynamis School and has been in practice for 11 years. She has a particular interest in sustainable healthcare and is a long-standing advocate for the protection of the environment and animal welfare. With a background in environmental science and journalism, She has worked internationally on river and wetland restoration projects and written for television and numerous publications including the Times Literary Supplement and the Ecologist. She has degrees in botany, hydrobiology and zoology, including a PhD from Cape Town University.
Summary: I have written this article to bring to the attention of the homeopathic community an ethical issue I feel strongly about; it’s one I suspect others feel strongly about too. While the ethical dimension remains the main driver for change, I believe, this is not the only reason, why experimenting on animals does homeopathy a disservice. In this article I explain, why it’s time to stop causing harm to animals in the name of homeopathy and to concentrate instead on forms of research that are more useful in practice, can benefit humanity and promote the therapy we know and love.
Ask most homeopaths what they think about the use of animals in homeopathic research and they naturally assume, you mean veterinary research based on the care of farm or companion animals. The idea of it involving artificially induced conditions in frightened laboratory animals does not naturally spring to mind – and why would it, given the safe, non- violent nature of homeopathy itself? This type of research, however, has been going on quietly in the background for years and now appears to be on the rise worldwide. In a long-overdue examination of an important ethical issue here are seven good reasons, why research into homeopathy should not involve experimentation on animals.
Reason 1: It involves suffering,
often severe
Animal experimentation within the field of homeopathy has been taking place for many decades. Today it is going on in universities and research centres throughout Europe, in India, South America, Australia and the middle East (Iran, Israel), with Brazil, India and Italy particularly well represented in English- language journals. Databases such as HomBRex and PubMed/MEDLINE contain the details of studies involving animals of all descriptions (mice, rats, toads, eels, guinea
pigs, non-human primates etc.) and a wide variety of conditions, most of them acute in nature. In the majority of these studies the ‘diseases’ and conditions of interest were artificially induced first in the experimental animals. Then one or two (occasionally several) remedies were given to the animals to study their effects on the induced condition.
The methodology used to make healthy experimental animals ill has been borrowed from mainstream biomedical research. So you will read about inflammatory states produced by injecting animals with substances like carrageenan to promote pain and swelling (Conforti et al, 2007); artificial diabetes created by means of alloxan (Kumar & Nayak, 2008); convulsions induced by strychnine (Alecu et al, 2010); nerve damage simulated by severing sciatic nerves (Mohammadi et al, 2012); sepsis created by puncturing intestines (Oberbaum et al, 2011); stress and anxiety enhanced by repeated electric shocks (Bousta et al, 2001), or forced swimming tests (Pinto et al, 2008), or sleep deprivation (Zubedat et al, 2013), or the use of mediaeval-style restraints (Dos Santos et al, 2007) and so on. You will find studies of bone fractures, where limbs are broken mechanically (Alecu et al, 2010), or burns, where the skin is scalded or irradiated (Alecu et al, 2010, Bildet et al, 1990), or infections with deadly diseases (de Almeida et al, 2008), or poisoning by mercury (Datta et al, 2004), arsenic (Banerjee et al, 2008), snake venom (D’Aprile 2013) etc. Even the notorious writhe test, strongly discouraged on welfare grounds by pharmacologists (see for example Gawade, 2012), has made an appearance in homeopathic research in the study of inflammation (Dos Santos et al, 2007). It involves injecting mice intra-peritoneally with irritant substances like acetic acid and counting the number of times, they writhe in pain, with or without treatment with anti-inflammatory medicines. Freund’s adjuvant – similarly discouraged because of the severe inflammation and tissue necrosis it causes, often leading to self-mutilation – has also been
used (see Patel et al, 2012; Sarkar et al, 2014). All these experiments cause harm and suffering, often severe, and all animals with the exception of non-human primates are killed (‘sacrificed’) at the end of the experiment.
In one particularly disturbing Brazilian study 12 capuchin monkeys were poisoned with cyclophosphamide (CP), a carcinogenic drug used to treat cancer in humans, to see whether a patented homeopathic combination remedy called Canova (CA) could mitigate the drug’s devastating effects on the immune system (Leal et al, 2012). Physical restraint (squeeze cages) and chemical restraint (ketamine) were used on a daily basis in order to weigh the animals and take blood samples from their femoral veins. All CP-treated animals became ill – two so seriously that they had to be destroyed before the end of the experiment. A post-mortem listed ulcerative lesions of the gastrointestinal tract, herpetic lesions of the mouth and skin, haemorrhagic cystitis and renal damage amongst other findings.
While welfare concerns inevitably focus on the experiment itself,we should remember that it’s not just the invasive procedures, lab animals are subjected to that cause distress. Experimental animals great and small experience fear more than anything else – pain included (Morton, 2013). Thus heart rates, blood pressure and stress hormones rise in response to routine laboratory procedures, such as handling and blood sampling and feeding through a tube (Balcombe et al, 2004). Barren living conditions can result in boredom and depression, which in turn lead to repetitive and uniform movements and even self- mutilation (Wemelsfelder, 1994). In the CP experiment the twelve monkeys were confined in individual cages for 50 days before the 40- day experiment even began – a deeply stressful experience for such highly social animals. We know that distressed animals generate unreliable information (Osborne, 2011), so how can research that causes unusual behaviour and physiology ever be considered good science? The short answer is, it can’t.
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