"We're selling you a dummy"

American homeopaths will be forced to report the unscientific nature of homeopathy

Oleg Lischuk, N+1

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a directive according to which manufacturers of over-the-counter homeopathic medicines will be obliged to provide reliable scientific evidence of the effectiveness and safety of their use in the same way as when registering conventional medicines. Otherwise, they will have to explicitly indicate on the packages that the use of drugs has no scientific justification.

The concept of homeopathy ("treatment like this"), developed in the late 1770s by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann, is that ultra-low doses of substances that cause symptoms of a disease can cure this disease. 

Such ultra-low doses are achieved by successive dilutions of the substance in water and alcohol: for example, 10 times, then each serving another 10 times, and so on. Special attention is paid to the ritual of dilutions, in which the vessel with the solution must be tapped on an elastic surface at each stage. The resulting dilutions often turn out to be such that the presence of substances cannot be determined by analytical methods, and in some cases each granule of the drug cannot contain even one molecule of the substance. Modern homeopaths often explain the effectiveness of their method by the pseudoscientific concept of "water memory".

Not a single double-blind randomized controlled clinical trial (and there have been a lot of them) has been able to demonstrate the difference between homeopathic drugs and placebo. This, however, does not prevent homeopathy from being a worldwide industry with multibillion-dollar turnover.

The reason for the FTC's decision was the conclusion of a specially created working group, which states that the effectiveness of homeopathy is supported only by the theories of homeopaths themselves, which are not shared by modern evidence-based medicine. At the same time, there is no reason to make an exception for homeopathy, allowing its adherents to declare the effectiveness of drugs in instructions and advertising without scientific confirmation of it, that is, to mislead consumers.

To avoid such deception of consumers, manufacturers of any over-the-counter homeopathic medicine were given two opportunities. The first is to provide the results of controlled clinical trials confirming its effectiveness and safety. The second is to directly indicate in the advertisement and on the packaging that its use has no scientific justification and is based on the theory of the 1770s, which modern medicine does not share.

Such labeling should be in close proximity to the description of the claimed effects of the drug or be included in it. At the same time, it is forbidden to belittle the significance of such labeling with additional positive statements about the merits of a homeopathic remedy.

The Commission voted for the new requirements unanimously. She also warned manufacturers of homeopathic medicines that she would carefully monitor unfounded statements in advertising and on product packages that would be regarded as a violation of the law.

In Russia, homeopathic medicines are sold freely, many of them are included in the official register of medicines.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  21.11.2016