(Published in Orissa Post Editorial Page on March 27)
Many staunch supporters of homeopathy in India were flummoxed a few days ago when a study by a reputed medical research body in Australia concluded that the more than 200-year-old system of alternative medicine is not effective in treating any medical condition. The Australian research body-National Health and Medicinal Research Council (NHMRC) even went ahead to state that homeopathy may put people’s health at risk if they delay treatment from trusted medicinal systems. The report sparked a fresh controversy in the medical fraternity in India. Many supporters wrote vehemently about the benefits of the system and how it helped them in the past. Many netizens too jumped onto the bandwagon of those who were discussing the burning issue.
Besides waves of disapproval of the system in Britain, Switzerland and Australia, the WHO too has indirectly attacked homeopathy as a system. WHO has already warned against using homeopathy for treating severe diseases like HIV and malaria. Nevertheless the famous campaign by Canadian-American scientific skeptic James Randi and 10:23 campaign group in UK January 2010 in the past had demonstrated the overdose of homeopathic medicines in public by taking excessive amounts of the medicine. By this they wanted to prove that it neither harms nor heals anything. The campaign spread to many countries across the globe including UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US.
Homeopathy was created in 1796 by German physicist Samuel Hahnemann based on the doctrine of ‘like cures’ which believed that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people will cure similar symptoms in sick people. The system is based on the concept of memory. By diluting these substances in water or alcohol, homeopaths claim the resulting mixture retains a memory of the original substance that triggers a healing response in the body.
The Australian report also says that while some studies do claim homeopathy was effective, the quality of those studies was said to be poor and suffered serious flaws in their design and did not have enough participants to support the idea that homeopathy worked better than a sugar pill.
However, in the case of India, homeopathy emerged as a good alternative to allopathy. Many streets in the country are flooded with several small and big homeopathy clinics. Many big brands too have jumped onto the bandwagon. In small cities too famous homeopathic doctors wield clout over large sections of patients.
The Central government meanwhile has been toiling hard to promote homeopathy and other forms of alternative medicines through several government interventions. A separate ministry christened Ministry of AYUSH was carved out to give importance to alternative medicines on November 9 last. Minister of State, AYUSH, Shripad Yesso Naik had many a time been seen clamouring in the two houses of Parliament about the government’s plan to promote the system. March 17 this year, in a written reply in Rajya Sabha, the MoS had informed the House that currently 52 universities across the country are offering different courses in homeopathy while the country is enriched with 2,79,518 registered homeopathic doctors.
The Centre has already constituted the Central Council of Homeopathy for regulation and education of the system. Government is now planning to open a new homeopathic institute in Shillong to extend the system to the north eastern part of the country. The Union government has already established the Central Council of Research in Homeopathy (CCRH) to conduct research in the subject.
Noteworthy, researches done by CCRH claim to have a positive role in decreasing viral load in HIV patients, in increasing CD4 count and improve quality of life of these people. This is in clear contradiction to the studies by the Australian and other global bodies and recommendations of WHO. Meanwhile, the Central government is planning to broaden the prospects of AYUSH and is extending financial supports to states/territories to providing infrastructure, finance, medicines to AYUSH institutions.
The government has also notified National AYUSH Mission to strengthen the system in the country during the 12th Five Year Plan. It will be worth watching if the country bends its policy after some global studies on the traditional system or will it wait for some more time to scrutinize the scenario itself.
It might be a good idea for the policy makers at the Centre to first do a detailed survey and study from grassroots levels to understand whether homeopathy really works. A major study could in fact contradict the findings of the major global studies. Moreover, in the growing era of digitization and database, it is of paramount importance to prepare a national database and evidence of effectiveness or ineffectiveness to understand the complexity of the homoepathic system on which many depend.
The row over the effectiveness of homeopathy is however not an alien topic for the globe. The use of the system got a major jolt in Britain when the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons in the country released a report in 2010 which found that treatments through homeopathy were ineffective. In June 2005, the Swiss government, after a five-year trial, withdrew insurance coverage for homeopathy and four other alternative medicine systems saying they did not meet efficacy standards. Experts believe the new Australian report could potentially harm the industry in Australia as it did in Switzerland and Britain. Many believe it can encourage the insurance firms to reduce the benefits covered under the system. However, a 2009 World Health Organization (WHO) review found Australians spending estimated $9.59 million on the industry alone which could be an indicator of why things are going the way they are.
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