A brand new study has discovered that arthritis patients found major benefit when they received homeopathy alongside conventional treatment for a six-month period. It was just published in the journal Rheumatology.
New evidence has surfaced that homeopathic practitioners could reduce the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. This is one of the world’s most common forms of joint pain, an autoimmune condition that has few treatments and no cure.
In the study, researchers found that arthritis patients significantly benefited when they added homeopathy to conventional treatments. Here’s an interesting twist, though: the improvements seen were due to the consultation process of homeopathy and not any particular remedies.
Though past studies have shown that homeopathy may help rheumatoid arthritis patients, this is the first one to show that these benefits are specifically due to its unique consultation process. These consultations differ from conventional medicine — homeopaths focus on treating the patient rather than treating the illness. The homeopathic consultation process improves the health of these arthritis patients based on standard rheumatology measurements, safely, and without side effects.
Homeopathy is a system of medicine established in the 1800s that uses miniscule amounts of toxic and poisonous substances (generally plant life) to cure the body of the same symptoms that that substance might cause. Example: poison ivy is ground up and diluted heavily and taken to combat a skin rash — the same sort of rash it would normally trigger in its pure, natural plant form. The easiest way to understand homeopathy is by imagining someone who is hungover and takes a drink the next morning as “hair of the dog.”
In the new study, researchers recruited 83 people with rheumatoid arthritis from clinics across the UK. Each patient received a series of homeopathy consultations over a 24-week period between January 2006 and July 2008, while continuing their conventional treatment. Patients and doctors reported significant reductions in a variety of symptoms, including reduced disease activity scores, fewer swollen joints, reduced pain and improved mood.
The team now plans to conduct more research into identifying which elements of the consultation process are most beneficial and if homeopathy is a cost-effective treatment.