“Chicago Tribune” - Homeopathic medicine
March 28, 2011 Chicago Tribune
March 14, 2011
Homeopathy is a 200-year-old system of medicine used successfully by more than 200 million people worldwide. It has a laudable and extensively documented clinical record and there are literally hundreds of high quality, peer-reviewed basic science and clinical studies showing its effects. Those studies have been published in journals like "Lancet," "Chest," "Rheumatology," "Pediatrics," "Archives of Internal Medicine" and "Neurotoxicology," to name just a few.
Given these facts, we'd like to offer additional facts to your readers about your March 6 health feature, "Homeopathy prospers even as controversy rages."
For the article, Edzard Ernst was asked to comment about homeopathy. Professor Ernst openly boasts to having no training in homeopathy. Since that is true one has to ask why and how he has assumed an expertise in this field? Would one listen to the comments of a biologist on a sophisticated particle physics question? Interestingly, Ernst, who calls homeopathy the "worst example of faith-based medicine," said that even if the solution is structurally different, it doesn't matter. That comment is a striking admission. On the one hand, Ernst contends remedies are no more than pure water and yet he admits that homeopathic remedies have unique characteristics.
Taking the lead from Ernst, the piece continues with these comments: "Few things rile scientific skeptics more than homeopathy?" Who, we must ask, are these "scientific" skeptics? Many of the most outspoken ? like Simon Singh (a partner of Ernst's), those from Sense About Science, The American Council for Science and Health and others have strong financial ties to the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Are these self proclaimed "skeptics" credible commentators on a system competitive with these industries?
Also in the piece: "Though it has been used for centuries and some studies have reported positive findings, the practice has no known scientific basis. Most analyses have concluded there's no evidence it works any better than a sugar pill."
There is a large body of emerging research by a number of credible scientists, including Nobel Laureate Dr. Luc Montagnier, that point to possible mechanisms of action. Claims that homeopathy defies all we know about chemistry and physics is simply false as scientists from Penn State, the University of Washington, Stanford, Harvard, Moscow State University, London South Bank University and others have shown.
And "most analyses have concluded there is no evidence it works?"? To make this claim is to not know all the facts. There are literally hundreds of studies ? pre-clinical and clinical showing homeopathy works.
We acknowledge that homeopathy is a difficult system to write about. But it is also a system relieving the suffering of many hundreds of millions around the world because it works!
