Homeopathy's Placebo Effect

Study Suggests Certain Remedies No Better Than Sugar Pills

(WebMD)  What really irks Frye and other doctors of homeopathy, however, is that homeopathic remedies are not supposed to be used like medical drugs.

"We are trying to treat the individual rather than the disease," Frye says. "Only 16% of these clinical trials looked at classical homeopathy as it is practiced. When we do clinical trials, we try to make them look like traditional medicine trials, but the reality is that is not where homeopathy excels. The more we try to fit the framework of traditional medicine, the more we are flawed in studying the way homeopathy is actually delivered."

For example, Frye says, homeopathy expert and University of Arizona researcher Iris Bell, M.D., Ph.D., recently studied homeopathic treatment of fibromyalgia. Bell's team treated about 60 patients but used some 40 different medicines, Frye says.

"Homeopathy is not one medicine for one disease, but medicine that matches the totality of symptoms a patient has," she notes.

Where's the Medicine?

The thing about homeopathy that drives most scientists to distraction is the dilution theory behind homeopathic medicines. The medicines are made by taking a substance and diluting it again and again — often until not one molecule of the substance remains in the final medicine.

The idea, according to material scientist Rustum Roy, Ph.D., of Penn State University, is that this changes the structure of the water in which the active substance is diluted.

"It is a fact that the structure of water and therefore the informational content of water can be altered in infinite ways," Roy says in a news release from the National Center for Homeopathy.

But other researchers find such arguments absurd.

In an editorial accompanying the Egger study, Jan P. Vandenbroucke, M.D., Ph.D., professor of clinical epidemiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Netherlands, notes that objections to the theory go back to 1846. It was then that British researcher John Forbes said that the idea of a medicine getting stronger the more it is diluted is "an outrage to human reason."

"I do not know what it is about the dilution theory that attracts people to it. I really do not know," Vandenbroucke tells WebMD. "But somehow the appeal has been consistent for 150 years."

What Doctors Can Learn From Homeopathy

Given his study, it is surprising to learn that Eggers thinks people get a real benefit from seeing homeopathic doctors.

"Homeopathy is difficult to reconcile with basic scientific principles," Eggers says. "But the clinical literature is compatible with the notion that people treated with homeopathy do feel better."