Rotavirus - homeopathic management, part 1
Jennifer Jacobs et. al. published several clinical controlled studies on the homeopathic management of childhood gastroenteritis. The first, conducted in Nicaragua in 1991, comparing individualized homeopathic treatment with placebo, was published in May, 1994, in the journal Pediatrics, the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the most respected journal of conventional pediatric medicine. The treatment group had a statistically significant (P < .05) decrease in duration of diarrhea, defined as the number of days until there were less than three unformed stools daily for 2 consecutive days, and a significant difference (P < .05) in the number of stools per day between the two groups after 72 hours of treatment. There of course followed disbelief - but the only substantial criticism raised in followup was that there must be a fatal flaw in double blind methodology - not in the methodology of this particular study, which was superb - but of double blind methodology in general, if it demonstrated an effect for homeopathy.
A meta-analysis on three double blind clinical trials conducted between 1991 & 2000 in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Nepal, was published in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, the publication of the European Society for Pediatric Infectious Diseases, in 2003. The conclusion published in this conventional peer-reviewed journal was that “homeopathy should be considered for use as an adjunct to oral rehydration for this illness.”
A trial of “homeopathic combination” therapy in Honduras in 2006, using a combination of the five most common single homeopathic remedies used to treat diarrhea (see below) failed to demonstrate a treatment effect, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the principles of homeopathic practice.
