Evidence Based Medicine

In regards to the debate found at http://nationalcenterforhomeopathy.org/media/in_the_news_view.jsp?id=789 accessed 9-9-09, I am now rethinking what constitutes "Evidence Based Medicine".

As seen in the debate, some doctors and medical literature argues that Homeopathy is not evidence based.

Wow! Historical accounts during times of epidemic. Now that is evidence based. Homeopathy is not missing "Evidence". Seems like there is plenty of evidence (see below for a sample). What Homeopathy is missing is people who understand the mechanism in terms of conventional medicine and newtonian physics. Some want a meachanism, one that fits into their current understandings.

Will a mechanim ever be understood? Does it matter?
Surely it matters for "Mechanism-Based" medicine. Does it matter for evidence based medicine? I think that what matters for Evidence Based Medicine is *** EVIDENCE!***


Andre Saine, ND
With more than 25,000 volumes, the homeopathic literature is very rich in reports about the results obtained by homeopathy during epidemics. Results obtained by homeopathy during epidemics reveal a very important and clear constancy--namely, a very low mortality rate. This constancy remains, regardless of the physician, institution, time, place, or type of epidemical disease, including diseases carrying a very high mortality rate, such as cholera, smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and pneumonia. This low mortality rate is always superior to the results obtained by the allopathy practiced at that particular time and, as a rule, the allopathy of today. Despite well-documented and official reports, the results obtained by homeopathy have been almost completely ignored by the scientific and medical communities, as if they had occurred in a void of time and space.I will now give five examples to illustrate these results:When cholera first invaded Europe in 1831, the mortality throughout Europe was generally between 40-60%. To the surprise of many, mortality rates reported by homeopathic physicians was generally below ten percent and, commonly, under four percent.I will now present two typical cholera reports, which have an official stamp to them. The first one comes from the territory of Raab in Hungary where, in 1831, a Dr. Joseph Bakody treated 223 patients with mild-to-severe cholera, 14 of whom were in the collapse state. He lost a total of eight patients, a mortality of 3.6%.A similar situation occurred in Cincinnati in 1849. The Board of Health issued an order calling for physicians to report all cases of cholera. The Board received reports of a high mortality rate from the city hospital and allopathic physicians. However, six homeopathic physicians attracted national attention when they reported not one single death out of their first 350 cases of cholera. Two of these homeopathic physicians, Dr. Pulte and Ehrmann would eventually report treating 2,646 cases with 35 deaths, or a mortality rate of 1.3%. Allopaths reported fatal outcomes in 50% of their cases.Now, let's move on and look at pneumonia, whose incidence and virulence has remained quite uniform throughout time. Before the era of antibiotics, the average death rate from pneumonia was 30%. Since the introduction of antibiotics, the death rate has only gone down to 18%. On the other hand, the death rate under genuine homeopathic treatment has always been less than one to three percent, even in patients suffering from the most fulminate type of pneumonia.Let's push our inquiry a bit further and look at the most fatal of all infectious diseases, rabies. I have been able to document more than a dozen well-described cases with unmistakable, fully developed clinical rabies that had uneventful recoveries under homeopathy without any prophylaxis whatsoever to assuage the virulence of the disease.This small sample of reports should be sufficient to illustrate the potential of homeopathy and incite real scientists, honest physicians, and intelligent people to examine homeopathy more seriously. Such extraordinary outcomes are not an exception in homeopathy but are the rule for all 33 infectious diseases I have so far investigated, which include typhus, malignant scarlet fever, meningitis, tetanus, anthrax, septicemia, and malaria.What you have seen today makes it clear--homeopathy is very plausible, and there is both ample clinical and epidemiological evidence that it works. Homeopathy will become an integral part of medicine despite the paradoxical nature of its remedies and all other prejudices against it, simply because homeopathy is safe, efficacious, and cost-effective.”