Homeopathy in Healthcare: Judging a book by its cover

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can do so and be fairly sure you’re getting the right picture.

A new book is about to be published with the title Homeopathy in Healthcare: Effectiveness, Appropriateness, Safety, Costs. From the title alone it’s hard to say whether it’s a load of rubbish (i.e. pro-homeopathy), or scientifically rigorous. Luckily, Amazon have provided the blurb from the back cover:

This volume includes the full Health Technology Assessment (HTA) report on effectiveness, appropriateness, safety and costs of homoeopathy in health care. The report was commissioned by the Swiss health authorities to inform decision-making on the further inclusion of homoeopathy in the list of services covered by statutory health insurance. Other studies carried out as part of the Swiss Complementary Medicine Evaluation Programme (PEK) caused a massive stir due to their schematic and exclusively quantitative (negative-)outcomes for homoeopathy. The present report, in contrast, offers a differentiated evaluation of the practice of homoeopathy in health care. It confirms homoeopathy as a valuable addition to the conventional medical landscape – a status it has been holding for a long time in practical health care.

There’s a few choice parts of the above text that tell us everything we need to know about this book. First, it claims to “[confirm] homoeopathy as a valuable addition to the conventional medical landscape”, which is at odds with study after study showing that homeopathy is no more effective a treatment than placebo. Of course, homeopathists seem incredibly reluctant to take note of those studies, so it’s hardly surprising that they should be ignored once more.

We can also look at the raison d’être for the book to understand the motivations of its authors. Apparently, it presents the results of an assessment commissioned in response to previous studies that consistently gave “(negative-)outcomes for homeopathy”. In essence, many previous studies found homeopathy to be ineffective; the commissioners here weren’t happy with those results, so set up a study of their own. A study being instigated with this mindset can only lead to a strong suspicion that its instigators were far from impartial regarding of the outcome they desired.

It also pays to look at why the authors decided that the previous studies did not meet expectations. Apparently, those studies were “exclusively quantitative” in nature. How this can be perceived as a negative trait is a mystery. If you’re going to assess whether a particular treatment is effective, you treat a number of people with that treatment, another set of people with a placebo, and count how many people got better. That’s the only way you can tell if a treatment is effective – by counting patients. And guess what? That’s what quantitative means – counting results and comparing them. Apparently, this wasn’t good enough for the authors of this book – simply working out who got better and who didn’t and whether or not the treatment had any effect on those patients is no way to assess the quality of homeopathic remedies.

Unfortunately, the snippet from the cover doesn’t state what methods the authors used to reach their conclusion, but since they dislike quantitative experiments on general principle it’s pretty certain that their approach is unlikely to impress the more rigorous scientists in the healthcare profession. For the sake of the Swiss public, let’s just hope the people holding the reins of their healthcare feel the same way.

December 5, 2011   Tags: homeopathy

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