DThe fact that more and more medical associations are saying goodbye to further training and the additional designation “homeopathy”, which doctors are allowed to advertise on the practice sign, is more of a symbolic step – there has been very little interest in it lately anyway. Nevertheless, it is currently causing heated discussions, for example among the Greens: A “crusade” is being carried out against homeopathy, explained its state chairman in Baden-Württemberg, Lena Schwelling – the local medical association, as the 13th of the 17 German chambers, no longer wants to issue these additional designations. For the Green State Minister of Health, Manne Lucha, it is “the absolutely wrong signal” that his house will “examine the process carefully,” he told the “Südwest Presse”. There are contraindications from the federal level: Paula Piechotta, Greens pharmaceuticals expert in the Bundestag, explained that Schwelling had “zero respect” for medical self-government and science. Your statement that there is “a whole series of clinical studies that prove the effect of homeopathy” is false information.
Scientifically speaking, Piechotta is right. Some homeopathy studies report an effect that exceeds the placebo effect. But to prove that the teaching invented by the doctor Samuel Hahnemann more than 200 years ago, based on ritual dilutions and supposedly healing “like with like”, is actually effective, individual studies are not meaningful. In general, if a question is investigated in studies – for example whether a drug prolongs the survival of patients compared to the administration of placebos – there can always be a false positive result. Researchers use statistics to try to keep the probability of this small, but it is not zero. With the number of studies, the risk of reporting an effect that supposedly exceeds the placebo effect increases – although this is only a statistical artefact.