शुक्रवार, अगस्त 26, 2005

होम्योपैथी...क्या है सच?


इनसे मिलिए- ये हैं जेम्स रैण्डी. अमरीका के हैं. जादूगर हैं. कलाकार हैं. लेकिन इनकी असल ख़्याति होम्योपैथी से जुड़ी हुई है. दरअसल जेम्स रैण्डी ने खुला ऑफ़र दे रखा है कि वैज्ञानिक विधि से यह साबित कर दिखाओ कि होम्योपैथिक उपचार सचमुच में बीमारी दूर करता है, और ले जाओ 10 लाख डॉलर का पुरस्कार.

होम्योपैथिक दवाएँ वास्तव में दवाएँ हैं, या मात्र छलावा?- ये सवाल मेडिकल रिसर्च में लगे लोगों को एक अरसे से बहस में उलझाता रहा है. यह सवाल एक बार फिर नए सिरे से उछला है. उछले भी क्यों नहीं, जब प्रतिष्ठित मेडिकल जर्नल लान्सेट इस पर सवाल उठा रहा हो.

अपने ताज़ा अंक में लान्सेट पत्रिका ने ब्रिटेन और स्विटज़रलैंड के विशेषज्ञों की एक संयुक्त टीम द्वारा किए गए 110 परीक्षणों की रिपोर्ट प्रकाशित की है.

अध्ययन टीम ने ये परीक्षण अस्थमा, एलर्जी और माँसपेशियों से जुड़ी बीमारियों समेत विभिन्न बीमारियों पर किए हैं. छोटे नमूने वाले सामान्य परीक्षणों में तो होम्योपैथिक और सामान्य अंग्रेज़ी दवाओं को ज़्यादा या कम असरदार पाया गया, लेकिन उच्च कोटि के परीक्षण में होम्योपैथिक दवाओं का वही असर देखा गया जो कि अक्रिय नकली गोलियों का था.

अध्ययन से जुड़े बर्न विश्वविद्यालय के प्रोफ़ेसर मैथियस एगर के अनुसार कुछ लोगों ने होम्योपैथिक दवाओं के असरदार होने की बात की है वो इलाज़ के पूरे अनुभव के कारण ऐसा कहते होंगे क्योंकि होम्योपैथ डॉक्टर रोगी को पूरा समय देते हैं, उन पर ध्यान देते हैं.

सोसायटी ऑफ़ होम्योपैथ्स ने न सिर्फ़ लान्सेट की रिपोर्ट पर बल्कि अक्रिय नकली गोलियों के मुक़ाबले किसी दवा के असर के परीक्षण की प्रक्रिया पर ही सवाल उठा दिया है.

उल्लेखनीय है कि विश्व स्वास्थ्य संगठन की एक रिपोर्ट में होम्योपैथिक दवाओं को गुण-रहित गोलियों से बेहतर माना गया है. लेकिन लान्सेट की मानें तो विश्व स्वास्थ्य संगठन की रिपोर्ट का आधार पुराने और आसान परीक्षण हैं. मतलब उस पर पूरी तरह यक़ीन नहीं किया जा सकता है.

लेकिन सवाल यह भी है कि लान्सेट की रिपोर्ट को ही हूबहू क्यों स्वीकार किया जाए! यानी सवाल बना ही रहेगा कि होम्योपैथी एक चिकित्सा प्रणाली है या मात्र आस्था का एक रूप?

3 टिप्‍पणियां:

Pratik Pandey ने कहा…

मुझे भी ऐसा ही लगता है कि होम्‍योपैथी की मीठी-मीठी गोलियॉं सिर्फ खाने में ही अच्‍छी लगती हैं, उनका असर कुछ भी नहीं होता। छ: महीने तक दिन में तीन बार परहेज़ के साथ होम्‍योपैथी की दवाई खाने के बावजूद भी मुझे एलर्जी में रत्‍ती भर लाभ नहीं हुआ। प्रत्‍यक्ष को प्रमाण की क्‍या ज़रूरत - होम्‍योपैथी छलावा है।

Dr Prabhat Tandon ने कहा…

क्या सच है और क्या झूठ , यह तो लैन्सट की की एकतरफ़ा रिपोर्ट है । किसने सच जानने की कोशिश की क्या अन्दर मे वास्तविकता क्या है । "WDDTY " ने यह सच जानने की कोशिश की है । नीचे देखें :
यह भी देखें । जान बिनथ रैन्डी पर पलट्वार करते हुये :
Secrets of Homeopathy, Part I
Secrets of Homeopathy, Part Two
Secrets of Homeopathy III

The shocking truth about homeopathy and the medical establishment .Research discovers doctors are not telling the truth to patients.
You probably use homeopathic remedies for you and your family, and so you know they work. Despite this, doctors keep repeating the mantra: 'There's no evidence for it'.
The most recent attack came from a group of 13 scientists and doctors, led by Prof Michael Baum, who urged the National Health Service to stop wasting money on 'an implausible' therapy that had never worked in any trial.
So how come it works for you, and for thousands of others? Most doctors put it down to the 'placebo effect' – you think it is going to do you good. But the real reason is far simpler, as researchers at What Doctors Don’t Tell You (WDDTY) have uncovered – doctors just aren’t telling us the truth about homeopathy.

In a special research project, WDDTY investigators have uncovered scores of major studies into homeopathy that all prove just how effective homeopathy can be, research that was ignored by Baum and colleagues.

The war against homeopathy
Worse, the WDDTY research team discovered that evidence had been tampered with or rejected to such an extent that it ceased to be science, and instead smacks of an agenda to finally kill off homeopathy as a genuine alternative to mainstream medicine.

Last autumn the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published a study that was so damning of homeopathy that the cover read 'The End of Homeopathy'. Beneath it, it told doctors that they 'need to be bold and honest with their patients about homeopathy's lack of benefit'.

Of course, this made national news – and no doubt many people were influenced by it. Sadly, the journalists, as always, took the story on face value, but there was another story to tell.
The Lancet's strident headline was based on a meta-analysis that reviewed 110 clinical trials in homeopathy. All the trials were of a high quality and were scientific, the researchers agreed. The majority of trials found that homeopathy worked or had 'a beneficial effect', as the research team put it.

Prejudice dressed up as science

However, the researchers decided to reject 102 of these trials from their final analysis. Eight of the 'rejects' were trials on patients with upper respiratory tract infection that had such positive results in favour of homeopathy that they could not be 'trusted'.

So, the researchers were already convinced that homeopathy didn't work, and so rejected trials that proved otherwise. In fact, they said so. When they set out to research homeopathy, they viewed it as 'implausible'.
After weeding out all the positive studies, they were left with just eight trials – and all of them 'proved' homeopathy didn't work.
It's strange that the press and doctors have latched on to The Lancet study, and ignored the many other major studies that had found in favour of homeopathy. The first major study took place 16 years ago at Limburg University in Holland. It was a two-year study that analysed the findings of 105 clinical trials – and, of these, 81 found homeopathy worked.
Eight years later, researchers from Munich University analysed 89 trials into homeopathy and concluded that it was more than 'twice as good' as placebo, which makes it as effective as any pharmaceutical drug.

Homeopathy is 'extremely significant', says EU study everyone ignored

The European Commission carried out its own research programme in 2000, and with even more rigorous standards. In the end they found just 17 out of 118 clinical trials that they felt were properly scientific – and, from those 17 trials, concluded that homeopathy had an 'extremely significant' effect.
Perhaps the most impressive trial in terms of size was carried out by the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital in Bristol, England. They studied the progress of 23,000 patients between 1997 and 2003, and found that 70 per cent reported 'clinical improvement'. More impressive still, most patients had tried homeopathy only after conventional medicine had failed them. In other words, these were people with the most difficult, intractable health issues. The biggest effect was among children, 80 per cent of whom reported a positive improvement from conditions such as asthma, eczema, and depression.

The two big arguments against homeopathy

Homeopathy's critics always cite two arguments: that the science behind it is 'implausible', and so therefore it's impossible for it to work, and any good effects are all in the mind. Taking the second argument first, homeopathy is very effective when given to animals, as studies have demonstrated, which demonstrates that the placebo effect is not an issue after all.
In one, pregnant pigs were given a homeopathic remedy to stop stillbirths. In the homeopathic group, the rate of stillbirths fell to 30 per cent compared to an 80 per cent rate in the control group that was not given homeopathy.

In another study of mastitis in cows, those who had a homeopathic remedy added to their water had a 3 per cent rate of mastitis compared with 48 per cent in those not given the remedy.
The first argument is subtler still. Effectively it states: 'It's impossible for homeopathy to work, so therefore it doesn't'. Prof Colin Blakemore of the UK's Medical Research Council has stated: "If we were to accept the principles of homeopathy we would have to overturn the whole of physics and chemistry."

Precisely. As you may know, science works according to 'paradigms'. Anything that adds to, or supports, an existing paradigm is accepted as science; that which refutes it is rejected as ‘unscientific’. In other words, science is a self-defining system.

It was implausible that the Earth should revolve around the Sun, as Galileo claimed, or that time was not an absolute, as Einstein demonstrated. In medicine, it was ‘implausible’ that a bug called helicobacter pylori could cause ulcers, or that folic acid could prevent neural-tube defects, but they did, and eventually the paradigm shifted.
But there’s a much bigger game at stake if we are to accept homeopathy as an effective therapy. It would mean that the way we treat people is wrong, that we do not truly understand disease, and indeed that human beings are not the mechanical pieces of flesh and bone that doctors and drug companies believe us to be.

Unknown ने कहा…

मुझे आपकी blog बहुत अच्छी लगी। मैं एक Social Worker हूं और Jkhealthworld.com के माध्यम से लोगों को स्वास्थ्य के बारे में जानकारियां देता हूं। मुझे लगता है कि आपको इस website को देखना चाहिए। यदि आपको यह website पसंद आये तो अपने blog पर इसे Link करें। क्योंकि यह जनकल्याण के लिए हैं।
Health World in Hindi