In the early 1600s, when Galileo declared the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around, he was branded as a heretic and sentenced to life imprisonment. Of course, it is unthinkable in today's modern scientific era of the 21st century to even contemplate how a few ignorant people can do such an injustice to a great man far ahead of his times. What kind of narrow-minded people were they that they had to imprison a man just because they could not understand what Galileo was clearly seeing? Such kind of intolerant and shortsighted behavior thankfully does not exist today. Or does it?
In one stroke, the journal The Lancet, declared homeopathy, a complete system of medical theory and practice, to be no better than placebo. (The Lancet 2005; 366:726-732]. The researchers have attributed "Bias in the conduct and reporting of trials is a possible explanation for positive findings of trials of both homoeopathy and conventional medicine". In the same breath, their own opening sentence is" Homoeopathy is widely used, but specific effects of homoeopathic remedies seem implausible."
Clearly, just like George Orwell's Animal Farm, where "some animals are more equal than others", some biases are obviously more acceptable than others.
What the researchers have done in their trial is equivalent to attempting to determine the height of a person using a weighing machine.
A randomized placebo controlled clinical trial denotes the practice in modern medicine, where to establish the efficacy of a drug A in a disease is by giving the drug A or a placebo to a selected group of patients suffering from a disease. This works fine for modern medicine, which takes into consideration only the disease.
{{/usCountry}}A randomized placebo controlled clinical trial denotes the practice in modern medicine, where to establish the efficacy of a drug A in a disease is by giving the drug A or a placebo to a selected group of patients suffering from a disease. This works fine for modern medicine, which takes into consideration only the disease.
{{/usCountry}}Homeopathy, on the other hand, developed by Hahnemann, lays emphasis on carefully examining all aspects of a person's health status, including emotional and mental states, and tiny idiosyncratic characteristics. Homeopathy attempts to treat the individual rather than the disease. And for a particular disease, there is no one treatment as understood by modern medicine and each individual patient may require a different medicine.
Thus, homeopathy is in actuality an advanced form of individualized treatment, which modern medicine has just woken up to and is slowly moving towards.
We have our own system of Indian medicine, the centuries old Ayurvedic system of medicine, which fell prey to the Britisher's inability to understand such a refined system of medicine and promptly banned it.
But a patient knows what works for him and will use it, declare it what you will. And ultimately, the detractors will be forced to eat humble as is evidenced from the growing "White" patrons of Ayurveda.