This is, to our knowledge, the first longitudinal study of cancer patients under homeopathic care in a parallel group design with conventional care and the attempt for a nested matched pairs comparison. Our primary aim was to see whether cancer patients under homeopathic care experience a benefit in their quality of life, psychological well-being and fatigue.
At study entry homeopathic patients were, roughly speaking, more severely affected and initiated homeopathic treatment at a later stage than their conventional counterparts. While conventional patients accessed treatment on average 3 months after first diagnosis or after diagnosis of tumour progress, patients in homeopathic care only started treatment 10 months after first diagnosis in an adjuvant situation resp. 7 months after a progress had been diagnosed. This explains the higher rate of patients pre-treated with chemotherapy or radiotherapy in homeopathic care.
While most patients used homeopathic care complementary to an appropriate oncological treatment, 10% refused to have such a treatment for various reasons and seek homeopathic treatment as an alternative. It is important to emphasise at this point that this patient decision was neither encouraged nor discouraged by the homeopathic physicians and has for the most part been taken before patients came to the clinic. All patients had been informed about the fact that the decision as to which therapy to have or not to have falls within their and their doctors' joint responsibility, as there was no experimental treatment within this observational study.
Despite the considerable difference in disease status of the two cohorts it is remarkable that their initial scores in virtually all self-reported measures in quality of life, fatigue, anxiety and depression at baseline are quite comparable. Compared with norm data [27] and oncological cohorts [26, 28] our patients have a more severely reduced QoL, more anxiety and depression and comparable fatigue.
During homeopathic care we saw a significant and stable improvement in QoL which, as measured by the FACT G, is sizeable at more than half a standard deviation. We do not see a comparable increase in QoL in the conventionally treated cohort. Such an effect size of more than half a standard deviation is by all standards a clinically relevant improvement [29, 30]. Some authors consider an improvement of 3 to 7 points on the FACT-G as the minimally important difference (MID) [31, 32], which is achieved by our homeopathy cohort who experienced an improvement by 5.5 points after 3 months and by 8.5 points after 12 months. While depression and anxiety did not change much, as measured by the HADS, fatigue improved significantly across all scales. Homeopathic care patients experienced an improvement of at least half a standard deviation after 12 months for mental fatigue, and both mental and physical fatigue improved to a degree that according to new norm data can be deemed a minimal clinically important difference [28].
In the conventionally treated group improvements were much smaller, failing half a standard deviation change by a wide margin. The MID is marginally reached with an improvement of 3.6 on the FACT-G after 12 months of treatment. Nevertheless, patients of both groups were satisfied with their treatment and their doctors.
One possible explanation for the lack of improvement in QoL in the CG is that considerably more patients of this cohort got chemo- or radiotherapy with possible acute side effects. This accounts for differences in the first three months, but after a time period of twelve months these differences should have washed out, especially because there were even more patients in a palliative treatment situation in the HG, and one important aim of the antitumour therapy is an improvement in QoL in the long run.
Since the cohorts were quite different, as expected from the outset, we refrained from any formal testing of the between group differences for the whole cohorts. For that reason we had anticipated a matched-pairs analysis. Since recruitment in the conventional centres fell considerably below the anticipated numbers we could not obtain the 40 matched pairs anticipated. Also, the complex matching process devised, with 3 oncologists having to agree on a comparatively large set of initial data, led to the fact that only very few potentially matchable pairs could be found. One might consider a randomised study whereby studying homeopathy as a complementary add-on an alternative. However, since there are so many differentiating factors influencing prognosis in tumour therapy, only a very large randomised study or a study using intricate balancing procedures [33] would have a chance of offering valid answers. In view of the experiences of other researchers mentioned in the Introduction and from the experience of our own study we doubt that cancer patients with a vested interest in homeopathic treatment will be willing to be randomised or allocated to treatments by processes other than their decision. It is unlikely that enough patients without preference would be willing to consent to be potentially randomised to either treatment.
A matched pairs study with sufficient power would have to document a number of conventionally treated patients by the factor 10 to 15 more than our study. This is not impossible to achieve, but a considerable effort. While it has been comparatively easy to include enough homeopathically treated patients it is difficult to recruit conventionally treated patients, as they and their physicians lack incentive.
The drawback of this study, that only the observational study part is evaluable by a very small number of comparable pairs, is obvious and does not allow for a final conclusion. The study also has clear strengths: We have subjected all data to rigorous validation procedures and have taken care to verify especially diagnostic and therapeutic information. Patient data are independent and hence likely free from bias. All patients willing to participate have been included, making our sample fairly representative for cancer patients seeking homeopathic care or modern standard conventional care. We have paid attention to comparing only strong exemplars of the treatments in question. The homeopathic clinics studied are well recognised in the field as the absolute experts in homeopathic care in cancer patients and have a very good reputation. So do the conventional clinics representing the state of the art in German oncology.
It is important to notice that we have not studied the effect of homeopathic remedies, but of homeopathic care. This comprises the whole setting of case taking, individualisation, finding the right remedy and following up on the perceived effects in multiple cycles of feedback and adjustment. It goes without saying that this is an intensive communicative, interactive process that operates via many different pathways, some of which are likely to be psychological and very general in the sense of a meaning response [34], some of which might be specific to homeopathic therapy and its usage of the remedies. It is also a likely scenario that homeopathic remedies are only active in an unbroken therapeutic context and that, at least for practical therapeutic reasons, the question whether homeopathic remedies are placebo or not, is irrelevant.
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