By Brian Carnell

Monday, March 4, 2002

Southampton General Hospital in Great Britain recently conducted a study to measure whether or not Homeopathy was effective in treating asthma, as its proponents claim.

Researchers identified 242 people who were asthmatic and allergic to house dust mite. Researchers gave some of those people a homeopathic remedy for asthma and the other half a placebo.

The results? No difference in lung function or quality of life between the group that received the placebo and the group that received the homeopathic remedy.

Of course this did not do a thing to dent support for treating asthma with homeopathic remedies among its supporters. The BBC quotes Dr. Peter Fisher who practices at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital and is critical of this study.

Fisher tells the BBC that, "There have been four studies completed which show homeopathy does work for hay fever, asthma and perennial rhinitis."

But those studies were all small and not as methodologically robust as this latest study, as the authors note in their discussion of their findings which were published in the March 2 issue of the British Medical Journal.

Consider, for example, one of the studies alluded to by Fisher -- a 28 patient study of homeopathic remedies given to rhinitis sufferers. It did find a benefit to homeopathy, but it had a serious flaw as the authors of the BMJ study note,

Other than attributing a type 1 error to the earlier study, which we believe was underpowered, one possible reason for the difference between the two studies may be because in the earlier study a homoeopath was involved in patient selection and could veto entry for any individual patient, though no details of entry criteria were given. Perhaps differences in patient recruitment or other unknown factors may explain the inconsistency of the results between these two studies. However, in view of the much larger sample used in our study compared with the earlier one, the proposal that homoeopathic immunotherapy is efficacious in selected patients with asthma should be treated with some caution.

The presence of subjective entrance criteria for the earlier rhinitis study is a huge red flag

Source:

Use of ultramolecular potencies of allergen to treat asthmatic people allergic to house dust mite: double blind randomised controlled clinical trial. G T Lewith, A D Watkins, M E Hyland, S Shaw, J A Broomfield, G Dolan, and S T Holgate. British Medical Journal, 2002;324:520, March 2, 2002.

Homeopathy 'no benefit' to asthmatics. The BBC, March 1, 2002.

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