Have you ever been cured by a homeopath?

Do you know anyone who has been cured by a homeopath? What happens after a homeopath cures your illness? You’ve been cured. You care. Your homeopath cares. Maybe your family cares. But officially, nobody else cares. Officially, homeopathic medicines are “just water.”

What does the science say? We can find homeopathic cures in medical science, but, we need to look beyond treatments. Most clinical studies measure “treatments that don’t cure“. We might want to believe researchers are searching for “cancer cures“. But no. Cancer cured, for example, is not medically defined. We have no test for a case of cancer cured.  Of over than 70,000 current and past cancer clinical studies listed at ClinicalTrials.gov, not one contains an accepted, testable, scientific, medical definition of cancer cured that can be used in medical practice. When a clinical trial encounters a cured case – no cure can be recognized. Cancer clinical trials measure treatment benefits, but not cures.

Some clinical trials do contain tests for cured. Some clinical studies of homeopathic treatments find cured patients. What happens after a homeopathic cure is found?  It disappears. Over time, it disappears even more. But, let’s look at a simpler disease, warts.

Cure for Warts?

Is there a cure for warts? Conventional medicine has no cure for warts. Tests for warts cured are weak and inconsistent. However – we do have a clinical study that tested for warts cured.

In 1996 the clinical study Homoeopathic versus placebo therapy of children with warts on the hands: a randomized, double-blind clinical trial. treated 60 children with warts. According to the published research, 6 patients were cured in the study. Five of the cured were treated with the homeopathic medicine.

What happened to all of the cures?  What happened to the cures from homeopathic treatments? They disappeared.  The scientific, peer-reviewed, published research study conclusion simply ignored the cured, stating: “There was no apparent difference between the effects of homoeopathic therapy and placebo in children with common warts under the conditions of this study.”  Five cures (16 percent of patients) in the homeopathic treatment arm of the study were ignored.  There was no further analysis.  The same is true of the cure in the placebo arm of the study. No medical researchers made any attempt to understand the cause of any cure. The cures, the presence and number of cures – were at odds with the study conclusions, apparently at odds with the study goals, so they disappeared.

Disappeared Again

Two years later, homeopathic cures were more disappeared — is that possible? In 1998, some of the same researchers undertook and published a second study.  The same number of participants. The same homeopathic medicine. The same placebo arm. And the results? How many patients were cured?  We don’t know.

In the second study, designed – in scientific theory – to test if the results could be replicated, cures were not counted.  Cures not part of the study parameters, and thus did not appear in the published results. All cured cases were simply ignored.

What happens after a homeopathic cure?  Patients might be cured, but the cures disappear from the medical view. It’s not just warts. Cured is not defined scientifically for any disease cured by homeopathy. Warts cured are not medically defined for any disease cured by homeopathy.

It is possible to cure an infectious disease, and prove it was cured by testing for the infection after treatment. But…. those cases can be cured by an approved medicine. The test for cured is: treat with an approved drug, retest for infection. If the infection is no longer present – it’s a cure. But homeopathic medicines are not approved for infections, so the test is not valid. If an infection is cured by a homeopathic medicine, it doesn’t count.

It’s not just homeopathic cures that disappear. No doctor, clinic, hospital, or medical system COUNTS infections cured by any treatment. Cures are counted in clinical studies – but in actual practice, they aren’t counted. There are no statistics for cured of any disease, so there are no statistics of homeopathic cures. Patients can be cured, but their cures don’t count.

The clinical trial Homeopathic medicinal products for preventing and treating acute respiratory tract infections in children, published in 2018, clearly illustrates the confusion around the word cure in clinical trials.  This was a meta-study. Most studies found were excluded due to poor quality or poor fit for analysis. Although the study objectives are to evaluate treatments, the word cure occurs over 80 times in the report.

Cured was defined several different ways, depending on the study being evaluated. The following quotes, from the meta-study illustrate the different functional definitions of cured the researchers encountered.

• Cure: defined as the reduction or resolution of symptoms of ARTIs (fever/body temperature, cough, pain, malaise/feeling of illness, rhinorrhoea, etc.) in the short‐ (up to 14 days) and long‐term (up to 3 months).
• Cure was defined as no severe persistent fever or pain after 24 hours and no moderate persistent fever or pain after 48 hours.
• Cure was defined as a symptom score of zero and a Tympanic Membrane Examination score of zero.
• Jacobs 2001 defined cure as no symptoms or a significant reduction in symptoms.
• None of the time points for cure were the same across the two studies (Jacobs 2016; Sinha 2012)
• Sinha 2012 provided long‐term cure data for day 21 of illness, and Jacobs 2001 for week 6 of illness.
• in Jacobs 2001 the cure rate was higher among children receiving homeopathy, while in Sinha 2012 the cure rate was higher in children receiving conventional treatment.

It is interesting that researchers use the word cure but not cured to define the cured state.

It’s clear that there is no independent definition of cured. Cure is defined independently by specific researchers in each study.

We have no scientific definition of cured.  Conventional medical bureaucracies have no Theory of Cure. Phrases like long term cure and cure rate have little or nothing to do with the condition of the patient, their disease, or its causes. Use of the word cure, rarely references any present cause of illness. Instead, cure tests measure signs and symptoms – consequences of illness.

Most clinical trials of homeopathy measure treatments that do not cure. This is the standard for almost all clinical trials. Cured is rarely defined and cannot be tested. We, for example, research into Homeopathy for treatment of irritable bowel syndrome. Cured is not defined for irritable bowel syndrome. If a cure occurs – it cannot be recognized and thus cannot be documented. Cures, when they occur, disappear. They are outside of the scope of the study.

Cured is not defined medically for any non-infectious disease. When any cure occurs for non-infectious diseases, no cure can be documented. The cured illness simply disappears.

Homeopathy is not the reason for this blindness. It’s just another casualty. No clinical study can find a cure for irritable bowel syndrome – until cured is medically defined.

Although the common mantra of homeopathy is “like cures like” (similia similibus curentur), cured is not defined in homeopathy either. Most use of the word cured in homeopathic research refers to symptoms, not disease. For example, “Symptom distribution according to predefined classes (common symptoms increased in intensity and/or duration-, cured, old, new and exceptional)” – is a nonsensical homeopathic definition of cured.

Unfortunately, conventional medicine also has no definition of cured for most diseases. Therefore, it cannot rebut homeopathic claims of cured. Instead, conventional medical practitioners, researchers, and their followers claim “homeopathic treatments cannot possibly work“. Works, in medical science, generally means helps with signs and symptoms of disease, but does not cure. If it cures, we could use the word “cure”.

What diseases do homeopaths cure? 

Homeopathic doctors don’t rely on “just water,” but those who criticize homeopathy only focus on claims that the water cannot cure. Actual cures are simply ignored. We simply don’t know what diseases or medical conditions might be cured by a homeopath. We don’t even know what diseases or medical conditions have been cured by homeopathy. When a homeopath cures a patient’s illness – the cured status and the cause of the cure are ignored by conventional medicine. The cures are ignored by homeopathic medicine as well. We have no statistics for cured by homeopathy.

What happens after a homeopathic cure?  It disappears. Cured is not medically defined for most diseases treated with homeopathic medicines.  The cured status disappears from the view of conventional medicine. It also disappears from the view of homeopathic medicine. Homeopathy aims to cure symptoms, not illness, not disease. Cures, accomplished by homeopathic treatments, are not even counted by homeopaths.

When a cure occurs in most clinical trials, the cure disappears. Cures in clinical trials of non-infectious diseases disappear, because cured is not medically defined for any non-infectious disease.

In conventional medical practice cured cases disappear as well. It makes no difference if the medical practitioner is an oncologist, a psychologist, a dentist, an obstetrician, or a general practitioner. No conventional medical practitioner counts cured cases.

When a cure occurs in a chiropractic medical practice, the cure disappears, even though many chiropractic cures are trivial to prove cured. The cure disappears.

So, when a homeopathic cure occurs, the cure disappears, but it’s not about homeopathy, it’s about cured.

To find scientific answers about cures by homeopathy, or by any other conventional or alternative medical treatment, we need to study cure, cures, curing, and cured. Attempts to measure the non-curative effects of homeopathic treatments vs placebos or vs conventional medicine, only asks the question:

“which treatment FAILS TO CURE better”

It’s a nonsense question. Without a definition of cured – we have no idea if the treatment cured the illness, or moved the condition towards a cured state, or away from one – ultimately making a cure harder. We can’t tell. To count cures, we need to count cured cases.

To study cures scientifically, we need to study cured. We need a theory of cure. A New Theory of Cure defines cures in a comprehensive fashion, providing a solid foundation for studies of treatments that cure.

to your health, tracy
Author: A New Theory of Cure