''So come, where is it? Where is this study which overrides all other studies showing homeopathy to have different effect to placebo? Lets have it. Post the whole thing here so we can see how they have set the record straight once and for all time regarding homeopathy. We'll see if you can actually read the literature and we'll see what they actually reckon they have done.''I have provided several reliable, respected Journals referring to reviews of up to 1,800 studies on Homeopathy, Australian medical, Swiss medical.....which you simply dismissed as being liars. If that's the best you can do, it's nowhere near good enough.
Once again, the links and citations are to be found in the article. It is all there, citations, methods, source material:
Abstract''Homeopathy remains one of the most controversial subjects in therapeutics. This article is an attempt to clarify its effectiveness based on recent systematic reviews. Electronic databases were searched for systematic reviews/meta-analysis on the subject. Seventeen articles fulfilled the inclusion/exclusion criteria. Six of them related to re-analyses of one landmark meta-analysis. Collectively they implied that the overall positive result of this meta-analysis is not supported by a critical analysis of the data. Eleven independent systematic reviews were located. Collectively they failed to provide strong evidence in favour of homeopathy. In particular, there was no condition which responds convincingly better to homeopathic treatment than to placebo or other control interventions. Similarly, there was no homeopathic remedy that was demonstrated to yield clinical effects that are convincingly different from placebo. It is concluded that the best clinical evidence for homeopathy available to date does not warrant positive recommendations for its use in clinical practice.''
MethodsLiterature searches were carried out in the following databases: Medline (via Pubmed), Embase, Amed, CISCOM (from inception to October 2001). The search terms used were homeopath . . . , homoeopath . . . , clinical trial, meta-analysis, systematic review, efficacy, effectiveness. In addition, other experts in the field (
n = 5) were consulted and my own, extensive files were studied. The bibliographies of all articles thus located were scanned for further relevant references. No language restrictions were applied.
Only systematic reviews (including meta-analyses) of controlled clinical trials of homeopathy with human patients or volunteers were included. Non-systematic reviews, overviews, clinical trials and reviews of non-clinical investigations were excluded. All articles were evaluated by the present author. The following information was extracted from the original articles: inclusion/exclusion criteria, total sample size, assessment of methodological quality, results of meta-analyses, overall conclusion of the authors.
ResultsSix re-analyses of Linde
et al.'s original meta-analysis [
3] were located [
4–
9].
Table 1 summarizes key data from these publications. The results of these re-analyses demonstrate that the more rigorous trials are associated with smaller effect sizes which, in turn, render the overall effect insignificant [
5,
6,
8]. One re-analysis suggests that the initial positive meta-analytic result [
3] was largely due to publication bias [
9], a notion that had been considered by the original authors but was rejected by them. Most notably, perhaps, the authors of the original meta-analysis [
3] concluded that their re-analysis ‘weakened the findings of their original meta-analysis’[
6]. Collectively these re-analyses imply that the initial conclusions of Linde
et al.[
3] was not supported by critical evaluation of their data.
