The safety of homeopathy

We have recently written the article about safety of homeopathy. A total of 1159 of adverse effects were reported in 38 primary reports and we concluded that homeopathy has the potential to harm consumers in both direct and indirect ways. Following that publication in International Journal of Clinical Practice, we faced a fiery critique (not surprisingly) from angered homeopaths.

In our factual (rather than emotional, personal, etc.) response, we addressed point by point any more or less reasonable comments posed by our opponents. I admitted making several mistakes- a few typos, one example of inaccurate translation, and misinterpretation of the heart disease case in a reply to the Letter to the Editor. Unfortunately, there were several issues raised by other authors, which I believe were less rational. We were accused of ‘lack of logic’ in our review. Some researchers could not understand how on earth homeopathy might have caused cancer, death, dialysis, toxic polyneuropathy and quadriparesis. We had to explain them the fact that low dilutions of arsenic, mercury, aconitum, or thallium are highly toxic and poisonous. Therefore it comes as no surprise that such undiluted ‘remedies’ can be lethal. 

Another, rather biased comment, we faced, concerned the alleged logical fallacy in our review. The question/comment was something like this: “why did we dare to address the safety profile of homeopathy when in fact it is totally harmless”?  To be perfectly frank, I do struggle to  understand such argument. People spend millions of dollars on homeopathic remedies and therefore they deserve to know whether homeopathy is safe or not. I never said that homeopathy is pure placebo, nor that it is devoted from any pharmacologically active ingredients. I strongly believe that we had a right to ask the question: how safe the intervention is?  It is as simple as that – homeopaths believe that a remedy works, I believe it should be thoroughly checked for safety-end of the story. For me personally, writing this review was ‘job as usual’. I had not had any preconception or bias prior to this article. I was simply doing my job, i.e. answering the research question, whether they accept it or not.

Anyway, in the discussion section we emphasized both strengths and limitations of our paper. I think some critiques of us did not read to whole article though. We stressed the often problematic nature of case reports. More specifically, their often poor quality and our inability to establish a cause-effect relationship between the homeopathy and the adverse effects. We never aimed at comparing adverse effects of homeopathic remedies with those of conventional drugs (even though such a publication is missing). One cannot also draw any meaningful conclusion regarding the possible incidence rate of adverse effects from our review.

To wrap-up this short post, I believe that our paper addresses important albeit in some environments neglected topic. To our delight, the EIC wrote that, they “will not retract the article, but will encourage continuing debate”.

Thank you for reading and understanding.

The author : )