Research on homeopathy, a 200-year-old form of alternative medicine, is often biased to make it look more effective than it really is, according to a new study out [recently].
Homeopathy researchers routinely neglect to register the details of their clinical trials before they publish their results, and unregistered trials usually provide rosier results than registered ones, the study found.
Over a third of registered homeopathy trials in the past two decades have also never been published, which can be a sign of burying unflattering findings.
Since 2002, they found, 53% of published homeopathy trials were never registered, and about 38% of registered trials went unpublished. Unregistered trials also claimed to show larger treatment effects on average than did registered trials. But even when researchers did publish the results of registered trials, they changed the outcomes they were looking for from the original plan about a quarter of the time.
Any one of these things may not be so bad in isolation, but put together they’re exactly the recipe for inflating how effective homeopathic treatments look in the clinical trial literature.
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Homeopathy is probably the clearest modern day example of junk medicine still around, and as this new research suggests, so too is the science meant to support it.
