Reply to ”The publication in Homeopathy of studies involving animal experimentation“ [Homeopathy 105/3 (2016) 211-216]

Sir,

Homeopathy is to be congratulated for addressing animal research in homeopathy in its editorial (The publication in Homeopathy of studies involving animal experimentation, July 2016).

You propose that authors should demonstrate compliance with the principles in EU Directive 2010/63. The two key principles are a harm:benefit assessment and the obligation to avoid using animals where a non-animal approach would give the desired information.

Because of dilution, homeopathy products are safe. That is why they are exempted from most of the requirements of the EU medicines directive. Research on animals cannot demonstrate efficacy, because homeopathy does not work on a condition/remedy basis but rather on a holistic, individual patient approach. Tellingly, you acknowledge that efficacy and safety testing – your categories 3 and 4 – are not relevant to homeopathy. What, then, is the point of using animals to advance understanding of how living creatures function and as experimental models to study disease processes – your categories 1 and 2 – if it is not going to lead to better treatments for humans?

In short, there is no benefit from using animals for homeopathy research, and the undoubted suffering which is caused must therefore determine the harm:benefit assessment against their use. No practitioner would prescribe, or forego, a particular remedy for a particular patient because of animal data.

Moreover, animal use can easily be avoided (the replacement requirement): since homeopathic remedies are safe, there is no ethical objection to using them on human patients, untested in animals. That is, of course, precisely what happens in practice.

We therefore cannot think of any situation where it would be in line with EU Directive 2010/63 to test homeopathic treatments on animals. We are concerned that merely directing authors to the EU Directive 2010/63 rather than making a clear policy statement is tantamount to actually not having a clear policy at all.

We urge Homeopathy to rethink and refuse publication of any research which has involved animals. That would be in keeping with the law, with science and with the ethical philosophy underpinning homeopathy.