Let me give you a quick rundown:

1) You are underestimating the capacity of both animals and children to acknowledge that certain actions of the parent / keeper / doctor etc. are meant to make their pain go away. For an astonishing example of “animal reacting to expectations” searcg the web for the “Clever Hans effect”.

2) You are forgetting that the success of the ritual applied to the child or animal is usually reported by the person administering (or at least having ordered) the treatment.

2.a) Your baby stopped crying after you applied homeopathic teething relief? But maybe it would have stopped crying after a little while anyway? Maybe a little pure water would have done the trick, or the fact that you are giving the baby more attention now? Don’t fall for the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy and simple “regression to the mean”.

2.b) Same “attention” and “get better anyway” thing goes for animals. On top of that, in many cases the animals are treated with both conventional medicine and homeopathic solutions/pills – yet any success is attributed to homeopathy.

3) I’ve seen a lot of such studies, and they are usually using homeopathy alongside conventional treatment, or lack control groups, or don’t have statistical strength (or statistical analysis at all)… or all of that. In essence, the studies are poor and can (by their design!) not find effects of homeopathy.

4.a) Yes, you are right that many drugs that actually work also have side-effects. Sometimes annoying, sometimes harmful, and very rarely even fatal. On the other hand they have proven benefits and can improve quality of life, can actually heal diseases and may even save lives.

4.b) Homeopathy does none of that; it entertains the customer (be it adult, child or animal) until he heals himself (or until conventional medicine does the trick). And since there’s nothing in it, it also has no direct side-effect. However, your (or your practitioner’s) belief in the sugar pills may prevent you from seeking proper treatment, which may negatively impact your health. Homeopathy will not keep your diabetes in check (hell, it’s sugar, it may even do harm here), it will not protect you against malaria or Aids and it will not heal your cancer.*

Greetings,
Daniel

*) I have just recently read a systematic review of Chinese herbal medicine (which from the start has more plausibility than homeopathy) as a complementary treatment (i.e. as pain relief or to support the healing process) for breast cancer patients. The effects found were so small that they were hardly clinically significant. And mind you, the studies in the review were all carried out without placebo control, so a huge danger for bias exists. One must assume that there is no acutal, reproducible effect at all.

Plenty of drugs have unknown modes of action but their efficacy is clear.

The problem with homeopathy and with most CAM therapies, however, is that when they are rigorously tested, they are found either not to work at all or to have extremely weak, trivial effects that are all but worthless.

The prize that has nothing to do with alfred nobel? The prize that rents the swedish parliament building in an attemt to give itself some qudos? Ha Ha Ha.

Have I won such a prize? No, I do not look for validation of my arguments from half-baked fake organisations.

There are some narrow-minded comments on this website that have an overall damning effect on the article presented in terms of credibility.

The SoH and Registered Homeopaths see positive results in patients on an ongoing basis. Nobody is claiming miracle cures out there, as some patients have a long road to walk.

George Vithoulkas was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize for Health in 1996 – have any of you achieved this on the quackometer?

I know who I would trust.

Homeopathy is supposed to be able to cure every damn disease. The fact that even by cherry-picking the evidence the largest effects they can show are trivial is itself pretty damning.