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Reason 2: It’s unethical
It is hard to reconcile much of the methodology mentioned above with homeopathy, a non- violent, safe and progressive system of medicine that evolved in response to the harmful medical practices of the day. But these experiments – sometimes bafflingly referred to as ‘pre-clinical research’ – are taking place, as you read this article. They are being approved by ethics committees, presented at conferences and published in journals (some of them British). It is important to note at this point that it is almost exclusively mainstream university researchers – rather than homeopaths – that are involved in this work, a fact that has important consequences for the nature and quality of the research and its relevance to the practice of homeopathy (see Reason 4).
Scientific journals have an important role to play in ensuring the research, they publish, gives full consideration to animal welfare and ethical issues, yet currently around 45% of English-language journals that publish animal research have no ethical policies on animal use, while 19% simply ask that research is conducted according to relevant laws or institutional guidelines (Osborne, 2011). These can be very variable in both the level of detail and the standards required, and often do not reflect best practice, which now requires researchers to question, whether the work actually justifies the use of animals and whether alternatives could be used instead (see Reason 6). So merely citing guidelines does little to ensure that a robust ethical review has taken place or that alternatives to animals have been thoroughly investigated.
When you combine weak animal welfare legislation with weak journal publication policies that don’t reflect best practice in animal research, you encourage work of dubious ethical quality, like that involving the writhe test described earlier, or Freund’s adjuvant, or non-human primates. You also encourage bad science. The findings of the CP study, for example, are completely invalidated by a small sample size. Twelve animals, assigned to three treatment groups, were used in this experiment – effectively too small a number for the results to have any statistical power (particularly as two of them died). So even though the researchers concluded that CA protects against DNA damage and damage to white blood cells, these conclusions are unsupported. An effective ethics committee would never give the green light to a study involving animals that was doomed to scientific failure, nor one involving non-human primates unless under very exceptional circumstances, nor one where alternative testing methods existed. And a journal editor working to a clear and robust ethical policy on animal research would have rejected the work for similar reasons.
demonstrate, how weak standards do nothing to foster high-quality, innovative research or encourage a shift away from animal models towards more scientifically relevant and ethical testing methodologies (see Reason 7). They encourage instead the kind of projects that do not require time-consuming enquiry and evidence gathering – work that cannot hope to address the burning questions that need answering within homeopathy. So more and more work is done, much of it ‘generally adequate’ (Bonamin & Endler 2010) rather than outstanding in quality, and more and more research papers follow the multitudes of other such publications into the ever-expanding cyber-vaults of electronic databases. Researchers often fail to meet even basic legal or institutional requirements on animal welfare. We know this from numerous exposés of work that has taken place at top UK research institutions (the breaches of animal experiment licences at Imperial College last year, for example), which gives little confidence that the same behaviour is not occurring in other parts of the world and within basic homeopathic research. One standard requirement of virtually all welfare guidelines that is never followed by homeopathic researchers (for fear of interfering with the experiment) is the provision of appropriate analgesia or sedation to relieve pain and distress. Thus control group rats in one of the Freund’s adjuvant studies were left for three weeks, whilst arthritic lesions in their feet became progressively more severe and painful. No pain relief was given, because this would have invalidated the experiment. Had the 12 monkeys in the CP experiment received the same standard treatment given to human patients undergoing CP therapy, their suffering would have been alleviated somewhat by anti- inflammatories, anti-nausea drugs and intravenous fluid via a drip. Instead, all that two of them received was euthanasia.
Ultimately, what really brings home the unethical nature of much of this research, are the insights that homeopathy has given us into the inner worlds of animals and their spiritual dimensions. Through our provings we have come to recognise the capacity of all kinds of species to experience joy, fear, grief, frustration and more (read for example some of the provings in Nancy Herrick’s Animal Mind, Human Voices). We cannot plead ignorance of this, or of the ability of animals to suffer in much the same way we do, and with this knowledge comes a moral duty to do all we can not to add to this suffering. ‘Humankind’s greatest goal, which outweighs the lengthening of life through medical advancements, is to evolve spiritually, and [that] in order to do this there is a need for us as a species to learn to think of other beings as ends, rather than means’ (David O. Wiebers, Emeritus Professor of Neurology, 1994).
Reason 3: It’s not getting us anywhere
We do research into homeopathy for three main
reasons: to add to the evidence base; to determine mode of action; and to improve clinical care for our patients.
As far as the evidence-base is concerned, sceptics say, there IS no evidence for homeopathy. This is not true of course, but while many randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of homeopathy have been carried out – with 44% showing a balance of positive evidence (a comparable percentage to trials of conventional medicine) – less than a third actually reflect real-life homeopathic practice i.e. classical, individualised homeopathy (British Homeopathic Association, 2014). It is hard to shoehorn a complex and holistic therapy like homeopathy into the confines of an RCT and doing so tends to turn trials of homeopathy into efficacy trials of a single remedy, as in conventional, ‘one-size-fits-all’ drugs trials. But ways around such obstacles are being developed (see for example the ingenious ‘cohort multiple RCT’ (Relton et al, 2010)), clearing the way for clinically relevant trials of homeopathy and, ultimately, additional evidence for its effectiveness.
How do basic animal studies contribute to the homeopathic evidence base? They can (and do) demonstrate biological action and they also disprove the notion that homeopathy is merely placebo. And there are certainly a very large number of them. But there is only so much that can be achieved through basic research. Ultimately lab animal studies represent the weakest evidence for an intervention (see Phillips et al, 2009) and no number of them will outweigh the findings of even a single well- conducted human study (Hess, 2004). So if demonstrating the effectiveness of homeopathy is a priority – as researchers say it is – then research efforts clearly need to be focussed on clinical trials, either human or veterinary, rather than basic animal research. In Brazil just 3.7% of academic research into homeopathy between 1985 and 2006 involved clinical studies – a staggeringly low proportion (Estrêla and Caetano, 2013). With cancer sufferers in every town and intractable problems with chemotherapeutic drugs, how much more useful would the CP study have been, had it involved real-life cancer patients receiving CP as part of their treatment – perhaps at the hospital where one of the researchers was based?
Veterinary research directed at improving the health of animals has yielded positive evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy and practical benefits at the same time – without recourse to harm. A recent study of diarrhoea in piglets carried out in the Netherlands, for example (Camerlink et al, 2010), demonstrates the role homeopathy can play in reducing antibiotic use on farms, while a British study of Cushing’s disease in horses and dogs demonstrates success rates comparable to conventional treatment but without the side- effects, relapse rates and cost (Elliott, 2001).
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This is just one of many examples that