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Barbara Roberts, Homeopath

World Homeopathy Awareness Week: Yes there IS homeopathy research

When I went to the 25 year celebration of the Auckland Pharmacy School last year, I was casually speaking to one of my pharmacy lecturers and mentioned that I had presented a poster at the HRI conference in Greece last year, and her response was “I didn’t know there was research in homeopathy”.

It feels like a very fitting theme for this years World Homeopathy Awareness Week, because this isn’t the first time I have had this response, and I doubt it will be the last time either. 

There is so much homeopathy research, and there is research in so many different areas. This includes

  • How homeopathy works
  • In vitro (lab) experiments using homeopathic remedies in cells
  • Homeopathy for plant growth
  • Homeopathy for animals
  • Homeopathy in many different health conditions
  • Who is using homeopathy
  • Who are our homeopaths

Before coming back to homeopathy research, I want to talk about medical research in general. 

Early in my pharmacy degree I did a paper about epidemiology, effectively about public health. As part of that I needed to learn HOW to read studies, and how to assess whether it is valid and worth considering, and how to identify not only the flaws in the study, but also to understand the discussion and the conclusion and be able to draw conclusions. That was quite a long time ago now, and at the time I didn’t appreciate it, but with an increasing interest in “evidence based medicine” I think it is essential.

In 2015, Dr Richard Horton, the editor of one of the premier medical journals wrote “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” (1) There have been further criticisms since, but despite this “evidence based medicine” is still the holy grail in the conventional medical system.

This makes actually analysing science more and more important. But there is so much research, and practitioners are so busy, that in many cases they’re relying on experts, and guidelines, in order to understand conditions and prescribe medication. That means the finer details, and the smaller studies may not make it – which is a good reason, if you are capable, to do your own research to make informed decisions.

So briefly, if you are looking at trials, here is an easy framework to do so: PICOT. 

  • P stands for the population, or the patient, and defines a specific group of people, or a specific problem. 
  • I is the intervention, meaning exactly what is being measured
  • C is for comparison, or control, so you can see what the difference is between the intervention group and the comparator group
  • O is the outcome, what the measure is, and
  • T is for timeframe – over what time is this being measured

I may not write it out like this every time, but it is definitely something I am looking for. It allows us to identify dodgy science – like short time frames that give ‘results’ but don’t show effects that are cumulative or come on after a period of time, or comparing one substance to another that is just as toxic and then stating there was no difference between the groups.

Then there is the hierarchy of evidence that is sometimes talked about. Where expert opinion is the lowest level of evidence, followed by case reports, case-control studies (looking backwards at people with a certain condition), cohort studies (following a group of people over time), then randomised controlled trials, systematic reviews and at the top, meta-analyses (3). Unfortunately though, this assumes that the quality of each is equal – which does require some assessment of what you are reading. 

But this post is about homeopathy research, and you may be asking, why am I bothering even sharing this?

Homeopathy research is held to this same standard – and can require the same analysis to understand what you are reading. Dana Ullman has a great discussion of four reviews of homeopathy, what was included and excluded and how this affects the conclusions of the review (4).

There are methodological issues in designing a trial of homeopathy – as homeopathy is individualised, how do you design that so that each person gets their consultation, and an individualised remedy, but also so that it is blinded? Fortunately there are some amazing trials that have solved this problem – but not enough! There were two systematic reviews in 2017 looking at both individualised homeopathy and non-individualised homeopathy, and the conclusion from these both were that more high quality research is needed (5, 6). That was over 8 years ago, and there has been more research in every area, but it needs to continue.

Homeopathy, for 200 years, has been characterised by case reports. It’s how we have been taught, how we remember the remedies because it is the story that stands out. Yet in that hierarchy of evidence case reports are pretty low on the pyramid. However, there has been an increasing move encouraging clinicians to publish case reports both in medicine and in homeopathy. The Modified Naranjo Criteria for Assessing Causal Attribution of Clinical Outcome to Homeopathic Intervention (MONARCH) is a way of having two independent reviewers read through a case and assess against standard criteria, including whether the results of the case are likely due to the homeopathic treatment (7, 8). I have a case which would be a lovely case report – this is something I will try and fit into my workload this year to see if I can join the movement of individual homeopaths contributing to the evidence base of homeopathy, one case at a time. 

Homeopathy also was the foundation for ALL drug trials that we have today. It was homeopaths who first trialled remedies on healthy human volunteers – what we call a proving, or is known in the literature as a pathogenetic trial. These are still happening to this day, and I was pleased to take part in one in February with an exciting substance that will be shared publicly at the New Zealand homeopathic conference in June. This idea of testing on healthy individuals is used to this day in a Phase I clinical trial for new medicines. 

But let’s go back to homeopathy. We have agrihomeopathy research – that looking at homeopathy for farming, and for growing crops. A scoping review of agrohomeopathy in 2024 shows the diversity of areas homeopathy can help in agriculture – from microbial control (bacterial, viral and fungal), pest control, conditions like temperature, cold and heat, heavy metals, and plant growth and production (9). There is research into use in livestock – a review by Doehring & Sundrum considered peer reviewed studies where a number of them showed the efficacy of homeopathy in cattle, poultry and pigs – however, because of the variation and lack of replication they did consider these to be single-case studies (10). It goes to show we still need more trials and more published evidence of efficacy. 

The other side of homeopathy research is sometimes called ‘basic’ research. This is to do with how homeopathy works, and also looks at the use of homeopathic remedies in the lab. It’s hard to argue that homeopathic remedies have an effect when there are laboratory trials. This is an increasing area of research, with each remedy tested in different cells showing different things. Two studies that you can read yourself are the effect of drosera on lung cells (11) and the antioxidant effect of Arnica, Arsenicum and Lachesis in microglial cells (12). 

My personal interest in homeopathy research is that looking at homeopaths themselves. If we don’t have qualified, practicing homeopaths, there is no individualised homeopathy to support people with chronic conditions. If you’re interested, you can read the two papers from the 2023 demographic survey in the references below (13, 14), but know that there is more to come about our New Zealand homeopaths, and also about who else is prescribing homeopathic remedies in New Zealand.

So after this little walk through research in homeopathy, what are you interested in with homeopathic research?
Do you have a research paper to share – one you have read that is a good example of homeopathic research? 

If you are a homeopath, is there research that excites you, that you would like to be involved in? I would love to increase our research base in New Zealand and would be happy to discuss and collaborate with you on a project! Comment here, send me an email or get in touch and let’s talk.

If you have school aged children who need science fair ideas, pop back tomorrow for my suggestion using homeopathic remedies and plant growth. 

  1. Horton, R. (2015). Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma? The Lancet, 385(9976), 1380. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60696-1
  2. Heidel, E. (2023). PICOT Research Question and Statistics. https://picotquestion.com/picot-question-and-statistics.html
  3. Siegfried, Tom (2017, November 13). Philosophical critique exposes flaws in medical evidence hierarchies. Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/critique-medical-evidence-hierarchies
  4. Ullman D. An Analysis of Four Government-Funded Reviews of Research on Homeopathic Medicine. Cureus. 2021 Jun 24;13(6):e15899. doi: 10.7759/cureus.15899. PMID: 34336416; PMCID: PMC8312774. 
  5. Mathie, R.T., Lloyd, S.M., Legg, L.A. et al. Randomised placebo-controlled trials of individualised homeopathic treatment: systematic review and meta-analysis. Syst Rev 3, 142 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/2046-4053-3-142
  6. Mathie, R.T., Ramparsad, N., Legg, L.A. et al. Randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of non-individualised homeopathic treatment: systematic review and meta-analysis. Syst Rev 6, 63 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-017-0445-3
  7. Lamba CD, Gupta VK, van Haselen R, Rutten L, Mahajan N, Molla AM, Singhal R. Evaluation of the Modified Naranjo Criteria for Assessing Causal Attribution of Clinical Outcome to Homeopathic Intervention as Presented in Case Reports. Homeopathy. 2020 Nov;109(4):191-197. doi: 10.1055/s-0040-1701251. Epub 2020 Mar 25. Erratum in: Homeopathy. 2020 Nov;109(4):e1-e2. doi: 10.1055/s-0040-1715843. PMID: 32215892.
  8. Penrose, S (2023). Influenza A associated binocular diplopia and concomitant accelerated myopia post COVID-19 mRNA biological injection. Similia Vol 36, No 2. December 2023,
  9. Ghate, Varsha & Chintalwar, Ragini & Mukherjee, Anupam & Jagtap, Suresh & Sathiyanarayanan, Arulmozhi. (2024). An Extensive Scoping Review on the Potential ofAgrohomoeopathy in Agricultural Evolution. International Journal of High Dilution Research – ISSN 1982-6206. 23. 161-180. 10.51910/ijhdr.v23icf.1397. 
  10. Doehring C, Sundrum A. (2016). Efficacy of homeopathy in livestock according to peer-reviewed publications from 1981 to 2014. Vet Rec. 2016 Dec 17;179(24):628. doi: 10.1136/vr.103779. Epub 2016 Dec 12. PMID: 27956476; PMCID: PMC5256414.
  11. Arruda-Silva, F., Bellavite, P. & Marzotto, M. Low-dose Drosera rotundifolia induces gene expression changes in 16HBE human bronchial epithelial cells. Sci Rep 11, 2356 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-81843-y
  12. Paumier, A., Verre, J., Tribolo, S., & Boujedaini, N. (2022). Anti-oxidant effect of high dilutions of Arnica montana, Arsenicum album, and Lachesis mutus in microglial cells in vitro. Dose-Response, 20(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/15593258221103698
  13. Gray, A. C., Luketic, C. D., Coleman, J., & Roberts, B. (2025). Demographics, practice characteristics, professional satisfaction and professional association engagement of homeopaths in New Zealand: Results from a cross-sectional workforce survey. European Journal of Integrative Medicine, 78, 102500. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eujim.2025.102500
  14. Gray, A. C., Luketic, C. D., Coleman, J., & Roberts, B. (2025). Tensions, Challenges, Risks and Opportunities in the Current and Future Delivery of Homeopathy in New Zealand: A survey of practitioner perceptions. Advances in Integrative Medicine, 100607. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aimed.2025.100607

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