Homeopathy... Anyone had any experience... saw one today and she said something rather strange....

[poppiesinaline]

she noticed that my children had long curly eyelashes and asked if someone in the family in past generations has ever had TB?

Apparently, if someone in the family has had TB, someone in the 2/3 generation later will have long curly eyelashes

Just rather odd I thought..... What on earth has curly eyelashes got to do with a lung disease!?

It's also unlikely that a conventional doctor would say 'there's nothing wrong with you' to a worried patient... but some of them do.

I wasn't suggesting anything, Jimjams, I was asking a question. You and Prufrock tell us that homeopaths are trained to refer on appropriately: I'm interested to hear from patients who have been referred.

Can understand that homeopaths may not be interested in convincing allopaths but what about the patients? Well-informed patients are very keen on evidence-based medicine nowadays, why not evidence-based homeopathy? Or other alternative/complementary therapy?

The intention-to-treat trial wouldn't necessarily mean depriving one group of treatment - you could use a crossover design.

Jimjams, I don't think that anyone can doubt, that a truely good Homeopath will have wonderful peopleskills, as that is so important...and the mind over matters factos can be very important, no matter what you belief in!
I may not really belief in it (although, had a Homeopathic Birthing Kit...only dh never really looked into it, and I was to much involved in my labour etc...to be off any help of what I did read about, etc....)...but, I do believe that Homeopath often have very good intution and people skills...and I am not cynic and am not trying to say that that is how they con people, lol....just that it is an important part of it...saying that, would be brill if all HP's could also be like that

prufrock...so how or better why does it work? Genuinely interested, if a non believer!

homeopathic patients surely fall into 2 groups (1) those referred by their GP or prescribed by their GP - in which case they'll either accept his interpretation of whether something is effective or they'll ask for conventional medicine. or (2) those who have referred themself to a homeopath in which case they're giving it a try (the way I began using it), or they already believe it. There has been research done, but it tends to be published in journals such as Biomedical Therapy. Getting this sort of study into peer reveiwed journals is always going to be tricky.

Elsevier have introduced an interesting journal to get round the problem of peer review - medical hypotheses which has quite a few homeopathy studies. It's a journal with a low impact factor and I think it would be very difficult to get a positive homeopathy paper published in a high impact journal. If you start looking around you'll find the results are mixed. There are papers listed here (see the appendix). Mixed results, and without actually reading what was done hard to draw any conclusions from.

Prufrock- at last I have the book on my lap- I'll email you now!

To those of you who are sceptical think on this:

it is not yet entirely understood how paracetamol works....but it patently does

and

when I had my ds the midwife said that she could always tell who was taking arnica as they healed much faster

But as someone else said - even if you believe that homeopathy works that does not stop some homeopaths from being shoddy or nutcases or worse. The same goes for GPs.