Revealed: The fate of medical industry depends on debunking homeopathy.

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Some pretty interestng stuff here . . . (courtesy a good doctor)[wddty.co.uk]The shocking truth about homeopathy and the medical establishmentResearch discovers doctors are not telling the truth to patients You probably use homeopathic remedies for you and your family, and soyou know they work. Despite this, doctors keep repeating the mantra:'There's no evidence for it'. The most recent attack came from a group of 13 scientists and doctors,led by Prof Michael Baum, who urged the National Health Service to stopwasting money on 'an implausible' therapy that had never worked in anytrial.So how come it works for you, and for thousands of others? Mostdoctors put it down to the 'placebo effect' ? you think it is going todo you good. But the real reason is far simpler, as researchers atWhat Doctors Don?t Tell You (WDDTY) have

uncovered ? doctors just aren?ttelling us the truth about homeopathy. In a special research project, WDDTY investigators have uncovered scoresof major studies into homeopathy that all prove just how effectivehomeopathy can be, research that was ignored by Baum and colleagues. The war against homeopathy Worse, the WDDTY research team discovered that evidence had beentampered with or rejected to such an extent that it ceased to bescience, and instead smacks of an agenda to finally kill off homeopathyas a genuine alternative to mainstream medicine.Last autumn the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published a studythat was so damning of homeopathy that the cover read 'The End ofHomeopathy'. Beneath it, it told doctors that they 'need to be bold and honest withtheir patients about homeopathy's lack of benefit'. Of course, this made national news ? and no doubt many people

were influenced by it. Sadly, the journalists, as always, took the story on face value, but there was another story to tell. The Lancet's strident headline was based on a meta-analysis thatreviewed 110 clinical trials in homeopathy. All the trials were of ahigh quality and were scientific, the researchers agreed. Themajority of trials found that homeopathy worked or had 'a beneficialeffect', as the research team put it. Prejudice dressed up as science However, the researchers decided to reject 102 of these trials fromtheir final analysis. Eight of the 'rejects' were trials on patientswith upper respiratory tract infection that had such positive results infavour of homeopathy that they could not be 'trusted'.So, the researchers were already convinced that homeopathy didn't work,and so rejected trials that proved otherwise. In fact, they saidso. When they set out to

research homeopathy, they viewed it as'implausible'. After weeding out all the positive studies, they were left with just eight trials ? and all of them 'proved' homeopathy didn't work.It's strange that the press and doctors have latched on to The Lancetstudy, and ignored the many other major studies that had found in favourof homeopathy. The first major study took place 16 years ago atLimburg University in Holland. It was a two-year study that analysedthe findings of 105 clinical trials ? and, of these, 81 found homeopathyworked.Eight years later, researchers from Munich University analysed 89 trialsinto homeopathy and concluded that it was more than 'twice as good' asplacebo, which makes it as effective as any pharmaceutical drug. Homeopathy is 'extremely significant', says EU study everyone ignored The European Commission carried out its own research programme in 2000,and with

even more rigorous standards. In the end they found just 17out of 118 clinical trials that they felt were properly scientific ?and, from those 17 trials, concluded that homeopathy had an 'extremelysignificant' effect.Perhaps the most impressive trial in terms of size was carried out bythe Bristol Homeopathic Hospital in Bristol, England. They studiedthe progress of 23,000 patients between 1997 and 2003, and found that 70per cent reported 'clinical improvement'. More impressive still, mostpatients had tried homeopathy only after conventional medicine hadfailed them. In other words, these were people with the mostdifficult, intractable health issues. The biggest effect was amongchildren, 80 per cent of whom reported a positive improvement fromconditions such as asthma, eczema, and depression. The two big arguments against homeopathy Homeopathy's critics always cite two

arguments: that the sciencebehind it is 'implausible', and so therefore it's impossible for it towork, and any good effects are all in the mind. Taking the secondargument first, homeopathy is very effective when given to animals, asstudies have demonstrated, which demonstrates that the placebo effect isnot an issue after all.In one, pregnant pigs were given a homeopathic remedy to stopstillbirths. In the homeopathic group, the rate of stillbirths fellto 30 per cent compared to an 80 per cent rate in the control group thatwas not given homeopathy. In another study of mastitis in cows, those who had a homeopathic remedyadded to their water had a 3 per cent rate of mastitis compared with 48per cent in those not given the remedy.The first argument is subtler still. Effectively it states: 'It's impossible for homeopathy to work, so therefore it doesn't'. Prof Colin Blakemore of the UK's

Medical Research Council has stated: "If we were to accept the principles of homeopathy we would have to overturn the whole of physics and chemistry."Precisely. As you may know, science works according to 'paradigms'. Anything that adds to, or supports, an existing paradigm is accepted as science; that which refutes it is rejected as ?unscientific?. In other words, science is a self-defining system.It was implausible that the Earth should revolve around the Sun, as Galileo claimed, or that time was not an absolute, as Einstein demonstrated. In medicine, it was ?implausible? that a bug called helicobacter pylori could cause ulcers, or that folicacid could prevent neural-tube defects, but they did, and eventually theparadigm shifted.But there?s a much bigger game at stake if we are to accept homeopathyas an effective therapy. It would mean that the way we treat peopleis wrong, that we do

not truly understand disease, and indeed that humanbeings are not the mechanical pieces of flesh and bone that doctors anddrug companies believe us to be. "Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit." - Aurobindo.

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