Homeopathy's Placebo Effect

Study Suggests Certain Remedies No Better Than Sugar Pills

(WebMD)  Eggers explains that his study casts serious doubt on whether homeopathic medicines have specific effects.

But there's more to homeopathy than drugs, he says.

"Perhaps the positive effect is due to the wider experience of meeting someone who is very interested in you, who takes a very detailed history that no conventional doctor would do," Eggers says. "It is the whole experience of this holistic system. I am not surprised when people get better and share these beliefs. But is it something in that little white pill, or is it something in the relationship and the process of seeing a homeopathic practitioner?"

The advantage homeopathy and other alternative therapies have over traditional medicine, Vandenbroucke says, is that practitioners of these treatments spend more time with people than doctors are able to do.

"Even if people give you the wrong explanation about what you seek treatment for, the fact that they spend a long time speaking with you might help," Vandenbroucke suggests. "This does not mean the principle behind homeopathy works. And the tendency of many medical doctors to say, 'Well, it won't do harm, and if the patients like it, let's do it' — this is intellectually dishonest. Because patients have a right to know if a medicine really works or not."

If the context of homeopathy works — but not homeopathic medicine — then doctors have a lot to learn.

On the other hand, just buying homeopathic remedies at your local drug store — where they are available without prescription — is a bad idea.

"My message to patients is clear and simple," Vandenbroucke says. "As a drug principle, homeopathy just doesn't work. That does not mean that if people talk with you for a long time, and are concerned about you, you won't feel better. But just going to the pharmacy and buying it does not work."

Frye, too, has advice for patients. She speaks as a patient as well as a practitioner — homeopathy, she says, once saved her son from a life-threatening illness.

"Homeopathy it is worth exploring to see if it can help, regardless of what the naysayers say," Fry says. "It is about treating patients, not about doing studies. Although we would love to do big studies if anybody was out there wiling to fund them."

SOURCES: Shang, A. The Lancet, Aug. 27, 2005; vol 366: pp 726-732. Vandenbroucke, J.P. The Lancet, Aug. 27, 2005; vol 366: pp 691-692. News release, National Center for Homeopathy. Matthias Egger, M.D., director, department of social and preventive medicine, University of Berne, Switzerland. Jan P. Vandenbroucke, M.D., Ph.D., professor of clinical epidemiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Netherlands. Joyce Frye, DO, MBA, president, American Institute of Homeopathy and postdoctoral research fellow, center for clinical epidemiology and biostatistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.