Drugs/Therapy

Meta Study Confirms Homeopathy Is Ineffective

By Kamal Nayan | Update Date: Apr 10, 2014 01:33 AM EDT

The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has released a paper that concludes "there is no reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective". However, the paper is still in draft and homeopathy advocates have time until May 26 to produce something better that could rule out the findings. 

Although NHMRC's primary role involves funding medical research, providing most of the grants for Australian medical scientists but they entity sometimes also conducts inquiries into issues such as the effectiveness of certain treatments. However, these don't conduct primary researches but summarize and examine the existing studies to a standard seldom achieved elsewhere. 

The NHMRC initiated the study to answer the question "Is homeopathy an effective treatment for health conditions, compared with no homeopathy, or compared to other treatments?"

"No good-quality, well-designed studies with enough participants for a meaningful result reported either that homeopathy caused greater health improvements than a substance with no effect on the health condition (placebo), or that homeopathy caused health improvements equal to those of another treatment," the report's summary stated. 

An area that was untouched in the investigation was the use of homeopathy for protection that includes homeopathic "vaccines". Experts raised concerns regarding the ignorance. 

"In my point of view as an immunologist, the most serious issue was the spreading of the concept that homeopathic vaccinations were harmless and just as good as orthodox vaccinations," said FSM co-founder Professor John Dwyer of the University of New South Wales, according to The Guardian.

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