Australian Research Council Releases First Report Concluding “Encouraging Evidence For the Effectiveness of Homeopathy”

Public pressure especially from the group Releasethefirstreport.com and from the Australian Senate has pushed the NHMRC or The Australian Government National Health and Medical Research Council into releasing a first report on homeopathy that they have said for years was not available.

Skeptics who lied about their bias and became part of the NHMRC research group looking into homeopathy, managed to bury a first independent report that was very positive about homeopathy. They replaced it with a second report that was replete with poor research standards and trickery to put homeopathy in a poor light. This second report was promoted around the world by skeptic organizations and the press as ‘homeopathy being ineffective.’

NHMRC CEO Prof Anne Kelso, now claims that even the NHMRC’s second report “did not conclude that homeopathy was ineffective”, despite claims to that effect by these anti-homeopathy campaigners.

“For over three years NHMRC have refused to release their 2012 draft report on homeopathy, despite Freedom of Information requests and even requests by members of the Australian Senate. To see this document finally seeing the light of day is a major win for transparency and public accountability in research.”  –Rachel Roberts, HRI Chief Executive

See Homeopathy Research Council

The Australian Senate has ordered the Research Council’s ombudsman to investigate the whole process and the Ombudsman report is imminent.

Global Outrage Over Australian Buried Report on Homeopathy

The first conclusions of the Australian Research Council were positive about homeopathy. As a result, known anti-homeopathy members of the Council squashed the report and then released a very negative report.

You can positively deal with this outrage now and get the Australian Government and Council (NHMRC) to release the first report. Releasethefirstreport.com  is a web site you can go to make your voice heard and read about the whole controversy.

The Society of Homeopaths in the United Kingdom reports: “Homeopaths in Australia have launched a global campaign calling on the government there to publish the first version of a review of homeopathy which they claim was deliberately ‘buried’.

The existence of the first report only came to light through a Freedom of Information request (FoI), although its contents have not been published. Campaigners say that the decision to suppress it and use a different methodology for the second review raises serious questions.

Justifying its decision not to publish the first report, NHMRC said its quality was poor, despite the research being carried out by the scientist who had written the council’s own guidelines on conducting evidence reviews.

The new campaign, Releasethefirstreport.com, is calling for the publication of the original, publicly-funded review in the name of transparency and to give the public access to all available evidence about homeopathy ‘so that they can make informed choices about their healthcare’.

An earlier Your Health, Your Choice campaign which highlighted the ‘flaws’ in the published report and drew public attention to the need to protect access to complementary and alternative medicines in Australia, led to 87,000 people signing a petition.

Releasethefirstreport.com is appealing for support from around the world and is asking people to sign up at its website.”

Research Expert Claims Australian Pharmaceutical Trained Researchers Misrepresented Clinical Evidence in Homeopathy

Australia’s research council has hired pharmaceutical trained “experts” to conclude that homeopathic remedies do not act like pharmaceutical drugs and are therefore “ineffective.”

Dr Robert Mathie, the Research Development Advisor for The British Homeopathy Association also had expressed reservation about the nature of the research being conducted by the NHMRC. “Given that a review of reviews is two stages removed from the original clinical trial evidence, it has the potential to misrepresent the totality of the relevant research”.

During 25 years in the university sector, Dr Mathie published over 100 peer-reviewed papers. Since 2010, he has focused on reviewing and clarifying the research literature on homeopathy by means of a major programme of systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials in human and veterinary homeopathy for The British Homeopathic Association (BHA). He is very positive about the results of research into homeopathy.

Also positive was the Swiss government’s exhaustive research into homeopathy- “After carefully monitoring homeopathic treatment in Switzerland and also taking an extensive overview of all scientific studies of homeopathy it concludes that “taking internal and external validity criteria into account, effectiveness of homeopathy can be supported by clinical evidence and professional and adequate application be regarded as safe”(PubMed).  They concluded that homeopathic treatment should continued to be reimbursed by Switzerland’s national health insurance program.”

The Swiss government researchers had no affiliation with pharmaceutical companies.