It is necessary to challenge Kathryn Borg’s article, ‘The cancer controversy’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, November 24), owing to its seriously misleading nature.

In this article it is suggested, almost unequivocally, that homeopathy may offer a different route to getting cured of cancer.

By way of reassurance, we are told that homeopathy (in India) has a long history and that Mahatma Ghandi, the father of modern India, described it as a “refined method of treating patients economically and non-violently” and that miracles are carried out every day at several homeopathic clinics in Calcutta – where “no less than 21,888 patients with malignant tumours were treated only with homeopathy”.

But we are told that this spectacular breakthrough in the treatment of cancer in India has not materialised owing to “lack of funding”.

Insinuation is also made that the driving force behind modern cancer therapy is profits from “big spend” drugs. This recommendation for treatment of a severe and life-threatening disease as cancer by homeopathy is based on hearsay and dubious evidence. It is both irresponsible and dangerous. Far from ‘educating’ and ‘informing’ patients, such misinformation to patients suffering from cancer can be very harmful and have tragic consequences, if taken seriously.

The very nature of homeopathic preparations makes any suggestion of its use in severe disease highly implausible. Homeopathic remedies consist of minute quantities of chemicals diluted in water. The solution is shaken vigorously (and, it is said, shaken ritually by forceful striking on an elastic body). It is then serially diluted until there is little, if any, of the original substance left in solution. This is supposed to create a ‘molecular blueprint’ in the water which stimulates healing mechanisms.

The vast majority of well-informed people maintain that homeopathy is a pseudoscience; many have demonstrated their disbelief by swallowing huge overdoses of homeopathic medicines without experiencing any effects whatsoever.

This is not to say that homeopathy is entirely bad medicine – like most other alternative therapies, it can be good medicine, even if only by virtue of its placebo effect, when practised wisely in the right context by a compassionate practitioner.

But it is definitely bad and dangerous science if a practitioner ignores its limitations. As with other alternative remedies, homeopathy becomes especially bad medicine with a great potential for tragic consequences if the therapist is antagonistic to conventional medicine and deters the patient from seeking proper medical treatment until, as often happens, it is too late. Herein lies the damaging potential of this misleading article.

This is not the place to discuss homeopathy at length. Suffice it to say that homeopathy cannot cure illnesses through any known pharmacological effect. Trials which purported to demonstrate efficacy of homeopathic therapy consistently lacked scientific rigour – and it is a well-known truism that the more unsophisticated the design of a clinical trial, the more likely it is that the results will be positive.

Quite often, the positive results of such trials are achieved by cherry picking as, for instance, by only reporting positive outcomes; the diagnoses are mostly unconfirmed so that diseases that are self-limiting are included in the trial, and so on.

Coincidentally, in the very same issue of The Sunday Times of Malta, just one page away, Maurice Cauchi’s article ‘The search for an alternative’, gave readers a good overview of the principles underlying modern, evidence-based medicine.

For each newly registered drug, undeniable scientific evidence of efficacy is mandatory before it is approved for release on the market. This entails rigorous testing by means of well-designed, controlled, clinical trial protocols in a large number of subjects – which may be tens of thousands.

Such in-depth research is unfortunately expensive – this explains the high cost of new drugs. That modern medicine is strictly evidence-based is further assured by a powerful research tool, the meta-analysis, by means of which medicine is constantly updated. As a result of such meta-analyses, drugs and older treatment approaches which had not been previously rigorously tested are systematically subjected to scrutiny and treatments that are found to be insufficiently effective are discarded. Needless to say, the foregoing applies equally to modern anti-cancer drugs.

Homeopathic medicines, on the other hand, do not pass through any such methodological hurdles. These are plain water or spirit solutions of chemicals in barely perceptible amounts which are sold in bottles (or somehow rendered in tablet form) and as unlicensed products – possibly at a handsome profit.

This recommendation for treatment of a severe and life-threatening disease as cancer by homeopathy is based on hearsay and dubious evidence. It is both irresponsible and dangerous

Patients suffering from cancer can be reassured that the powerful drugs necessary for their treatment have been thoroughly tested and their curative effects demonstrated. Unfortunately, the frequent, severe side to these powerful drugs are inevitable. But progress continues with ongoing research and treatment will continue to improve as the years pass.

Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that patients, somewhere along their arduous journey through therapy, seek alternative treatments in desperation; it can be said that, at most, these alternatives may offer some temporary comfort but cannot achieve a cure.

Of course, patients may wish to try such alternative treatments at their own responsibility. But if they are misinformed, they are liable to make the wrong treatment decision with dire consequences. This is wrong.