Well, I'm not sure if I was understood - people NEEDING the SAME REMEDY - as prescribed by a "classical" homeopath, NOT "PEople with the same disease receiving the same remedy", but even then the potency they need might be different - that's to make the results reproducible. But in addition to this there is also a chance that the homeopath will not obtain (through analysis) the true, curative, similimum from the first go. For me personally we had to change 3 remedies before it has started to work, my daughter finally gets better after 5 changes of the remedy and my husband gets the 5th remedy which finally works as well.

And did you note that I mentioned suppression? People might well react - as with the Kali bichromium study, but one needs to do follow-ups for a couple of years to see if the response was due to curative or suppressive action as per Direction of cure.

How would you deal with this possibility in terms of control with placebo? THe homeopath will see no result - I hope noone supposes that people in the trial would all show sufficiently clear remedy picture form the start and consequently sufficiently visible results after just one dose of the remedy? - and the homeopath will think that the case needs to be reassessed if the study is blinded... MY opinion is that it is really not possible to determine anything in a short-time protocol, people often need more than a year to show any objective improvement, because obviously the statistically minded people will refuse to accept any subjective improvements that the patients might report.

I recall that there was a follow up study that covered periods for 5-6 years of treatment which showed definite improvement in people who received real homeopathic treatment.

After all - is medicine for people intended to cure people, or people for medicine - people used as guinea pigs to test if someone's theory is right or not? I'm rather in favour of the first "option" - and therefore I think that anything else than long-term clinical observations are simply unethical from a humanitarian point of view, be it allopathic medicine or homeopathic medicine or Chinese Medicine - or whatever.

Have you ever thought about this?