What is it with these guys denying the existence of all meta-analyses except the one early flawed one that benefits them?

[Quote from grateful patient: “Thank you so much for everything you have created at the hospital. I wonder if you realise how important it is for those of us who depend upon it's environment to calm us, strengthen us, and then send us out into the world to cope for another while.”]

One must ask, why bother with homeopathy at all when the environment does all the healing for you? And, how wonderful to find that they imagine this could all be provided within the usual constraints of the NHS budgeting process!

I would suggest a little trial which could help resolve the issue as to whether homeopathy works……

Get a homeopath to run outpatient consultations in a draughty portacabin in the middle of a car park next to a building site, at least 100 yards from the main hospital building with all its ancilliary services, and at least 500 yards away from the pharmacy and 800 yards from the laboratory (I was in this situation until very recently). Give the patients 10 minutes per visit.

Give a conventional hospital consultant the opportunity to work from the facilities of the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital site, and give him 45m – 1 hour per consultation.

After 6 months, compare patient outcomes using a similar “customer satisfaction” survey as did Dr Spence at Bristol. Publish the results on the front page of the the Daily Mail.

Registration criteria -
In order to qualify for registration the products must:
1. Be for oral or external use – this includes all methods of administration with the exception of injections;
2. Be sufficiently dilute to guarantee their safety;
3. Make no therapeutic claims.

So they stopped the introduction of new ‘treatments’ because they couldn’t prove it. But now they can sell what they like, as long as it’s quackery!

I doubt it. These things are usually done on massive scale screening projects, sometimes by the academics but usually by pharma. The results of the millions of compounds that bring no leads in the pharma screens are more than likely trashed and they move on to the next set of compounds.

So it’s interesting what you say Morag: “pretty much everything in common use has already been looked at in that respect.” There’s a change in the way pharma are looking at this. Historically the chemists and the informaticists got together and thought up criteria for compound-types to screen for a particular application and the biologists screened it. Or, alternatively the chemists screened them themselves using modelling techniques and other clever stuff. But now they are turning more to screening theme and variations on ‘natural’ compounds as their starting points. i.e. start with a compound type from a plant etc. and make progressive changes to it’s structure then screen them all against your target. But it’s a monumental task – screen every imaginable substance with every known medical condition. It will never all be known.

Background to the legislation on licensing of homoeopathic products
Until the introduction of the Homoeopathic Registration Scheme in 1994 the only homoeopathic medicines available on the market were those granted product licences of right (PLRs) when the Medicines Act came into force in 1971. Attempts to acquire marketing authorisations for new homoeopathic medicines were unsuccessful owing to difficulties in proving efficacy in conventional clinical trials.

Current legislation for homoeopathic medicines
The Homoeopathic Registration Scheme, implemented under a European Directive 92/73 EEC, is a simplified regulatory procedure, whereby products are assessed for their quality and safety and can then be marketed without specific medical claims. The simplified registration scheme thus enables a rapid introduction of new homoeopathic medicines onto the UK market.

Fantastic, isn’t it?

Here’s another webpage that’s got a nice cartoon and articles on dodgey scients/medicine including references to Dr Spence’s dodgey homeopathy trials.

And what basis were they approved on… that fact thay they are just unlikely to kill someone? (or do anything to them for that matter)

And if they are not approved then what on earth are we doing paying for these things on the NHS for….. and thats apart from the whole matter that these things don’t bloody work anyway.

If the effect is only as good as placebo then why don;t we have the normal GP do a consultation and (if warrented) then send them down the chemist with a prescription for a bunch of sugar coated sugar pills? It would be cheaper than the tapwater merchants

as for selective quoting it was just pointing out they have what they have always had. As for the poisonous etc it just means never cross an apothacary!

As for all commonly used “medicinal” herbs having been researched etc….. does anybody know of a database or some central knowledge base that lists what has been researched along with results? After all i’ve not seen any Vetiver sleeping tablets and it’s a damn fine soporific (in my own experience that is, sample size one, no control group)

I should point out that while they were looking for the antimalarial that eventually became artimisinin, they tested over 300 herbs the Chinese “had been using for” malaria “for hundreds of yeards”. All but one was found to have no efficacy at all. The remaining one was the jackpot. I think there’s a lesson there somewhere.

I didn’t just say the herbalists were left only with the ineffective plants, please don’t use selective quoting. I said “This leaves the herbalists with the ineffective plants, the poisonous ones, and the crude unpurified extracts which could contain practically anything.” Which is pretty much what they had in the beginning, right enough. My point was that such has been the interest in purifying and exploiting useful compounds from herbs, pretty much everything in common use has already been looked at in that respect. So, if there really is useful activity in the herb, there is almost certainly a purified and standardised and tested and licensed version of the compound. If no such pill exists in relation to any herbal claim, you really have to ask yourself, why not?

was not aware that Dr & Herbs had been promoting that tea for bird flu. having said that, one of the ingredients for Tamiflu is, or is derived from, Star Anise. So rather than put down Ban Lan Gen tea out of hand, what i’d say is ask who’s done an analysis of the tea and what it contains, then test the active ingredients to see if there is any provable benefit…. who knows they may actually have something…. stranger things and all that.

Also as for “But the main similarity is the almost complete lack of any evidence base” i’d have to say that there is evidence in plenty. After all if there was no evidence for medicinal properties then why were medicines developed from them?

Yes there are problems in herbal medicine as both Tessa and Morag pointed out along with your self is that there is a quality control problem. Different batches of the plants will contain differing levels of the active ingredients and may also contain impurities depending on the soil it was grown in. So yes the pill form is much more practical and a good bit safer to boot.

Morag also said “This leaves the herbalists with the ineffective plants, the poisonous ones, and the crude unpurified extracts which could contain practically anything. Which would you rather take?” Sorry but i’d have to disagree with this. Herbalists are not left with the ineffective plants, they are left with exactly the same plants as they have always used.

Also “Big Pharma” are not even coming close to discovering all the medicinal properties of plants, fungi etc let alone being able to synth the active ingredients. There are still plant species being discovered and as long as thats the case then the posabilities, let alone the actual benefits, are nowhere near tapped out.

I’ve just had a thought….. you all remember the water that could draw the sharpness out of lemon juice? well if it works the way it say’s then we could sort out the problem of nuclear waste by burying it surrounded by bottles of water…. and people said it would be a problem for centuries!!

And I believe such requests meet political resistance.