Quackery and fraud in alternative medicine unintentionally revealed by a homoeopath

On 8 September, I published the article, “Doctors get angry when I document that their medical emperor has no clothes.”¹

I summarised some of my rocking the boat experiences under these headings:

· Of mites and men

· Pfizer ties the legs of the competitors’ racing horses and wins

· The powerless placebo

· Mammography screening, the great hoax

· The Texas sharpshooter fraud

· The industry is in total control over a trial in progress

· The truth about organised crime in the drug industry was taboo

· Psychiatry, a crime against humanity

· Opening up EMA’s archives

· General health checks

My article led to 50 comments in just 8 days, all positive, also one from a person named Roger, but that changed quickly when I started responding to him on Substack.¹

Roger thanked me for my work “trying to keep the drug industry accountable. I am sure many people are alive today as a result of your efforts.” He asked what I thought about “the studies that show conventional medicine is one of, if not THE, leading cause of death.” Well, I have shown that our prescription drugs are the leading cause of death, ahead of heart disease and cancer.²

Roger used the remainder of his comment to discuss various articles and reports about homoeopathy even though my article did not discuss homoeopathy or other alternative remedies. He claimed that over 220 years of well-documented literature showed that it “is effective in acute and even so-called incurable chronic diseases.”

Roger criticised that the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia had “arbitrarily excluded studies that had less than 150 patients” in their report.

But this was prudent. Many placebo-controlled randomised trials have been carried out and a 1997 meta-analysis of 89 trials in The Lancet reported a large effect of homoeopathy, an odds ratio of 2.45 (95% confidence interval 2.05 to 2.93).³ The authors concluded in a somewhat convoluted language that homoeopathy worked, which was inappropriate because they documented that there was extreme sample size bias. The apparent effect was much larger (the x-axis) when there were few patients in the trial (the y-axis):

Four years later, other researchers looked at the same trials.⁴ They found that the treatment effects were much larger in small studies, in studies with inadequate blinding (as it is easy to produce an identical placebo, it is inexcusable not to blind studies), and in trials published in non-English languages. There was no effect in the trials that were properly done.

In 1993, before these meta-analyses came out, I commented on the homoeopathy trials in The Lancet.⁵ I explained that it was not surprising that beneficial effects had been found in many trials because positive findings in clinical research can often be explained by bias:

“Rather than accepting the absurd idea that placebo can be better than itself, or that water can remember what was once in it, it seems more realistic to assume that the positive results in the homoeopathy trials were caused by bias.”⁵

I illustrated this by referring to my doctoral thesis. I had analysed 196 double-blind trials comparing a new non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) with a control NSAID. Significant results for effect variables were claimed five times more often than expected whereas all significant differences in side effects favoured the new drug over the control drug (39 versus zero).

It is not possible that new drugs in a therapeutic class can be both more effective and better tolerated, and my meta-analyses of the same trials showed that the claims were false.^5,6

The massive bias seemed to have been produced during data analysis and report writing. Bias in the conclusion or abstract favoured the new drug in 81 cases and the control drug in only one (P = 3.4 ∙ 10^-23, which was the smallest P-value ever reported).⁶

It was rarely possible to reanalyse the reported P-values but in 12 trials, significant differences in effect were wrong and, in all cases, they favoured the new drugs.

There was a lot of fraud in these trial reports. Fraud is also common in alternative medicine. If a trial report describes a large effect, the investigators might have tampered with the results or simply made them up, or they could have added an active drug to the homoeopathic solvent to make sure it worked. Sometimes homoeopathic remedies even contain a deadly substance. In the United States, several babies died after the biggest manufacturer of homoeopathic remedies put the deadly nightshade, Atropa belladonna, in its “teething” tablets.⁷

Clearly, the huge effects in many of the placebo-controlled randomised trials of homoeopathy must have been fraudulent (see graph above).

As I have more important things to do than to engage in fruitless discussions with people who believe homoeopathy is effective, I replied briefly to Roger: “Drugs are the leading cause of death and homoeopathy is total bogus. Nothing in it.”

Another commentator, Benjamin Gilad, wrote: “It is a bit surprising that the author, being a pioneer in exposing the corruption in Pharma is almost casually dismissing alternative therapies such as homeopathy. Perhaps he is not as familiar with the difficulty of testing classic homeopathy remedies (being different treatments for the same condition based on individuals’ differences) than he is with double blind clinical trials of standard drugs. I still admire his crusade against the once reputable Cochrane organization.”

I replied that I am not casually dismissing alternative therapies, which I have studied a great deal, and referred to my publications on my homepage. I added that “Homoeopathy is the most ridiculous bogus therapy there is.”

I published three articles about alternative medicine earlier this year,^8-10 which included a comment on the weirdest and most unscientific Cochrane review I have ever seen, about praying for others to cure diseases, which I called a pillar of shame. The authors mixed scientific and religious arguments in an absurd way that totally defies the rules of logic.¹⁰ They even assumed that prayer could wake the dead, 4-10 years after they had died.

My reply that homoeopathy is bogus led to a second comment from Gilad: “As an economics professor I taught statistics so I am a bit surprised at your ability to test claims with n=1. Classical homeopathy can’t be subjected to double blind tests. You may be skeptical of its foundation, including water memory, but your statistical reviews are not the appropriate tool.”

I have no idea what Gilad meant with n=1. I have never tested claims in a trial with just one patient. I replied that it is nonsense that homoeopathy cannot be studied in double-blind trials and that there are many such trials. They are ridiculous of course because they compare nothing with nothing. The whole area is nonsensical.^8,9 Randomised trials of homoeopathy are futile since we already know that homoeopathy cannot be more effective than placebo homoeopathy, as they are both just solvents with no active substance in them. An instrument should be used for what it was designed for and we do randomised trials when we have genuine doubts about whether treatments work. We have no such doubts for homoeopathy.

Roger claimed we need to ignore 90% of the studies to conclude that there is no support for homoeopathy and encouraged anyone to try homoeopathy, which was amusing. Trying homoeopathy is like drinking a glass of water. What are we supposed to conclude from that?

Next, Roger talked about homoeopathy in India and said he had seen “dozens of patients every day being cured of every condition known to mankind.” No understatement here. It can be pretty warm in India, so perhaps the patients were thirsty?

Roger upped the amusement: “You might reconsider homeopathy based on some direct experience of it, instead of just relying on theorizing ‘its too diluted therefore it can’t work.’” He ignored that we already know that doctors’ experiences are unreliable.

Roger noted that the central principle of homoeopathy is that like cures like and claimed that the top 500 conventional drugs he has examined have side effects that match the indications for their usage. This led him to conclude that conventional medicine is practicing bad homoeopathy! He referred to the inventor of homoeopathy, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, who discovered paradoxically that the effect was stronger if diluted properly. Anyone can “experience personally the power of these extremely diluted medicines.”

Present-day homoeopaths still believe that preparations leave some sort of imprint in the solvent.⁹ In other words, they claim that water can remember what it once contained.

Hahnemann created the centesimal or C scale, diluting a substance by a factor of 100 at each stage. A 2C dilution therefore means that there is one part of the original substance in 10,000 parts of the solution. A 12C dilution means that the original material is diluted by a factor of 10¹². If we start with a one centilitre syringe, it corresponds to dissolving the active substance in all the world’s oceanic water. Hahnemann advocated 30C dilutions for most purposes, i.e. a dilution by a factor of 10⁶⁰. This corresponds to dissolving the substance in a cube of water with sides far larger than the distance from the Earth to the nearest galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away.

For homoeopaths, this is not a problem. A solution that is more diluted than another is described as having a higher potency, and homoeopaths consider more diluted substances to be stronger and deeper-acting. Absurd is too mild a word for this insanity.

I replied to Roger: “I do not understand why so many people like to be fooled. I just don’t get it. Homoeopathy is the most ridiculous nonsense therapy we have.”

Roger then resorted to a trick the drug industry often uses to convince people: big numbers. He said that between 300 and 800 million people worldwide use homoeopathy as their primary medicine. He claimed that he had been cured of “incurable” malaria in 3 days with no relapse, in an epidemic where 10,000 died.

I wrote about malaria in one of my articles.⁹ Some homoeopaths convince their customers not to take malaria prophylaxis when travelling in infested areas. In 2006, the BBC visited Britain’s biggest manufacturer of homoeopathic remedies with a hidden camera. When the journalist said she planned to go to Malawi, a high-risk area, the shop assistant suggested garlic, oil of citronella and vitamins rather than a trip to the doctor. The assistant even said to the journalist that the homoeopathic compounds would protect her: “They make it so your energy doesn’t have a malaria-shaped hole in it so the malarial mosquitos won’t come along and fill that in.”

Such gobbledygook is typical of the way practitioners of alternative medicine “explain” things.

The BBC revealed that some homoeopathic pharmacies claimed their products could treat malaria instead of antimalarial drugs. Homoeopathic pharmacy websites show many products with indications, e.g. for influenza, and there are homoeopathic replacements for vaccines against measles, mumps and rubella, and homoeopathic pills for hepatitis, tuberculosis and typhoid.

Gilad posted a third comment. He was surprised and disappointed that a man who dedicated his life to poking holes in the arrogance of medical research and medical practice, resorts to arrogant insults: “Roger is right - you haven’t looked at the research (even a cursory search of Google Scholar can help), and you never actually experienced homeopathic treatment ... shouldn’t wise people keep some humility?”

Gilad cannot know to which degree I have studied homoeopathy. I have studied it more than enough.

Roger was unstoppable. He claimed that the mechanistic paradigm prevents us from seeing that clairvoyance is well documented! Later, he claimed that I had obviously not read anything he had written, which he cannot know and which is untrue, but perhaps he was clairvoyant. He urged me to try homoeopathy, which I don’t need as I drink water regularly.

Roger had an anecdote about a lawyer who was bringing a lawsuit against homoeopathic pharmacies in California. He convinced him “to do a proving of an extremely dilute remedy. He was blown away by the new never-before experienced mental, emotional and physical effects.” Perhaps they have stronger water in the United States than we have in Denmark.

Roger provided two comments on another of my articles, “Alternative medicine is no alternative. It doesn’t work and may kill people.”⁸ He used the diversion trick that philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer described in his book, The art of always being right:¹¹

“If you are being worsted, you can make a diversion - that is, you can suddenly begin to talk of something else, as though it had a bearing on the matter in dispute and afforded an argument against your opponent … it is a piece of impudence if it has nothing to do with the case, and is only brought in by way of attacking your opponent.”

Roger discussed some weaknesses of conventional medicine. This is irrelevant for a discussion of homoeopathy. As I often say about this type of argument: One illegal parking does not make the next illegal parking legal.

What else did this homoeopath say?

Having come this far, I looked up on my Substack account who Roger is and found out that he is a homoeopath named Roger Barr. As what he writes on his homepage¹² is typical of the nonsense homoeopaths and other quack doctors propagate, I shall allude to some of it.

Roger claims that the action of homoeopathy ”is extremely short-lived and gentle” and that homoeopathy stimulates “your body’s innate ability to heal itself.” There are no effects for the patients apart from separating them from some of their money.

Since alternative practitioners have no reliable research in support of their – not dilutions but delusions - they use anecdotes and name dropping, which Roger also does:

”Homeopathy cures a greater percentage of cases than any other method of treatment” (Mahatma Gandhi); ”I can’t manage without homeopathy. In fact, I never go anywhere without homeopathic remedies. I often make use of them” (Paul McCartney); and ”The introduction of homeopathy forced the old school doctor to stir around and learn something of a rational nature about his business. You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths to destroy it” (Mark Twain).

Under Resources,¹³ Roger reveals that he is an AIDS denier: ”AIDS is not a disease.”

He reports that he once treated a 4-year-old girl with severe ear infection. She was screaming and the ear drum was extremely red and inflamed. He notes that three facts, clingy, evening onset and ear infection, led to homoeopathic Pulsatilla which is very commonly used for ear infections in young children. He gave her a dose of that and when the girl was seen by the nurses at the emergency room a few hours later, her ear looked perfectly normal. She was apparently cured.

I have written about a 7-year-old Italian boy who died from an ear infection that had spread to his brain.⁹ The family’s homoeopath - who played doctor - discouraged the mother from giving the child antibiotics even though his condition worsened over a couple of weeks and advised continued homoeopathic treatment. In contrast, a doctor on call advised that the boy should immediately go to hospital. When his parents finally called for an ambulance, it was too late. They were charged with manslaughter.

It is immoral to prescribe homoeopathy because the patient is deceived and it can be deadly. Since homoeopathy is licensed in some countries for the treatment of specific symptoms, this could encourage the patients to delay seeing a doctor.

Roger also has a section on his homepage about Covid resources, with totally preposterous claims.¹⁴ He says there are over 200 studies of chloroquine, 100% of which had positive results for the early stages of Covid-19.

Chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine can cause serious heart-rhythm problems and they don’t work for Covid. Randomised trials have shown that hydroxychloroquine tend to increase mortality, the initiation of ventilation, and hospital stay.^15-17

Roger mentions that Professor Dolores Cahill has debunked the Covid narrative referring to a one-hour interview. The interviewer disabled discussion of the video but nonetheless called it a MUST WATCH. This is not necessary. I mentioned her in my book about the virus made in China.¹⁵ You would not expect someone with a doctorate degree in immunology to claim that “If you’re under, like, 70 or 65 and you’ve no underlying conditions, this is all a hoax.” Cahill has also claimed that Covid-19 can be prevented by taking vitamin C, vitamin D and zinc; that the most efficient treatment is hydroxychloroquine; that children wearing a mask would be starved of oxygen and see their IQ lowered; that the RNA-based vaccines do more harm than good; and that once you get Covid-19, you are immune for life.

All of this is false. Students at her university wrote a 33-page scientific rebuttal of her claims, signed by 133 people. Cahill behaves like a quack selling supplements. Unbelievably, she has been active in the field of scientific integrity.

Arguing against physical distancing, Cahill claimed that only three organisms are transmitted via the air, tuberculosis, smallpox, and Ebola. I wonder if she ever heard about the diseases we call measles, influenza, and the common cold? SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, also spreads through the air.

About the possible origins of Covid-19, Roger mentions that Nobel Prize winner Luc Montaignier stated that the virus has a section of RNA taken from HIV. Nothing was taken from HIV. Chinese researchers inserted a furin cleavage site,¹⁸ which made a harmless virus so deadly that I have estimated that, including the collateral damage caused by the lockdowns, it has killed 26 million people.¹⁹

Roger recommends Dr. Joseph Mercola‘s blog, which ”publishes lots of information on how to boost your immune system and heal naturally.” Mercola, an osteopath, is a disinformation spreader who built a large business selling supplements and related products. The FDA has sent Mercola multiple warning letters for making illegal claims that his products can prevent or cure diseases. His claims about vaccines are highly untrustworthy and he has been a major financial supporter of anti-vaccine organisations.

Roger praises Del Bigtree for his vaccine videos. In my vaccine book,²⁰ I explain why his film Vaxxed is horribly misleading anti-vaccine propaganda. Dr. Andrew Wakefield, one of the worst fraudsters in medical history who launched the totally debunked idea that the measles vaccine can cause autism, is depicted as a hero in Bigtree’s film.

Roger calls PhD Judy Mikovits a respected researcher whose interviews were mostly taken down. I fully understand that. Among her many outrageous claims are that vaccines kill millions; that, “If you’ve ever had a flu vaccine, you were injected with coronaviruses;” that hydroxychloroquine is effective against Covid-19; that using masks could lead to people infecting themselves with their own breath; and that “Ebola couldn’t infect human cells until we took it in the laboratories and taught them.”¹⁵

Amazon praises one of her books saying that she has always been on the leading edge of science; that her doctoral thesis changed the treatment of HIV-AIDS, saving the lives of millions; and that she made a spectacular discovery of a new family of human retroviruses.

This is totally false.¹⁵ She did not discover a new family of retroviruses and very likely committed fraud. Science retracted her article about this explaining that multiple laboratories, including those of the original authors, had failed to detect the virus.

Conclusions

There are too many dangerous quacks around. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a quack is an ignorant, misinformed, or dishonest practitioner of medicine, and the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners states that fraud is any activity that relies on deception to achieve a gain.²¹ You can decide for yourself, is these facts mean that homoeopaths are fraudsters.

The last paragraph in my article about the emperor’s new clothes that led to so many comments is:¹ ”You will not be surprised that, when I was once asked what the biggest obstacle in my career had been, I responded promptly: Stupidity. It’s endless.”

In Greenland, they say that if you swing a whip over a pack of sleigh dogs, the one who feels hurt will howl. But, in contrast to humans, dogs stop howling at some point. I like dogs. You can trust them.

References

1 Gøtzsche PC. Doctors get angry when I document that their medical emperor has no clothes. Gøtzsche’s Perspective 2026;Sept 8.

2 Gøtzsche PC. Prescription drugs are the leading cause of death. And psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death. Mad in America 2024;April 16.

3 Linde K, Clausius N, Ramirez G, et al. Are the clinical effects of homeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials. Lancet 1997;350:834-43.

4 Sterne JA, Egger M, Smith GD. Systematic reviews in health care: Investigating and dealing with publication and other biases in meta-analysis. BMJ 2001;323:101-5.

5 Gøtzsche PC. Trials of homoeopathy. Lancet 1993;341:1533.

6 Gøtzsche PC. Bias in double-blind trials. Dan Med Bull 1990;37:329‑36 (review of the six papers in my doctoral thesis); Gøtzsche PC. Methodology and overt and hidden bias in reports of 196 double-blind trials of nonsteroidal, antiinflammatory drugs in rheumatoid arthritis. Controlled Clin Trials 1989;10:31‑56 (amendment:356).

7 Kaplan S. Hundreds of babies harmed by homeopathic remedies, families say. Scientific American 2017;Feb 21.

8 Gøtzsche PC. Alternative medicine is no alternative. It doesn’t work and may kill people. Gøtzsche’s Perspective 2026;Feb 6.

9 Gøtzsche PC. None of the most popular alternative remedies are effective. And it can be deadly to believe that they work. Gøtzsche’s Perspective 2026;Feb 22.

10 Gøtzsche PC. Praying for others to cure diseases? Cochrane review of intercessory prayer is a pillar of shame. Gøtzsche’s Perspective 2026;March 8.

11 Schopenhauer A. The art of always being right. London: Gibson Square; 2009.

12 You Can Heal Yourself with Homeopathy. Roger Barr’s homepage. Undated.

13 Resources. Roger Barr’s homepage. Undated.

14 Alternate CoVid Resources. Roger Barr’s homepage. Undated.

15 Gøtzsche PC. The Chinese virus: Killed millions and scientific freedom. Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2022 (freely available).

16 RECOVERY Collaborative Group; Horby P, Mafham M, Linsell L, et al. Effect of hydroxychloroquine in hospitalized patients with Covid-19. N Engl J Med 2020;383:2030-40.

17 WHO Solidarity Trial Consortium, Pan H, Peto R, Henao-Restrepo AM, et al. Repurposed antiviral drugs for COVID-19 - Interim WHO Solidarity Trial results. N Engl J Med 2021;384:497-511.

18 Gøtzsche PC. The Fauci papers reveal his narcissism and devastating lies about Covid-19. Gøtzsche’s Perspective 2026;Sept 1.

19 Gøtzsche PC. Did the Draconian Lockdowns Kill More People than Covid-19? Brownstone Journal 2025;Dec 2.

20 Gøtzsche PC. Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy. New York: Skyhorse; 2021.

21 Fraud 101: What Is Fraud? Association of Certified Fraud Examiners 2026.