• Question: Do you think that more research should be put into homeopathic and herbal remedies to infections, as microbes are less likely to become resistant to them, and they are often safer to use than prescribed antimicrobials?

    Asked by Mhairi to Sally, Rob, Matt on 10 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Sally Cutler

      Sally Cutler answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Hi Mhari, there is research looking at homeopathic and herbal remidies (including at my university). Why do you think it is less likely for microbes to become resistant to these? When you think that antibiotics are often produced by other microbes to give the producer an advantage over others, you can see that they too are often natural products too. Some have been chemically modified to add to their action, but nature designed these too. You also mention safety, but here I need to add a word of caution. The data has not been collected for many herbal remidies as these were not as regulated as antibiotics. There is also huge variation in the amounts and quality of ingredients as they did not need to comply to quality control. Only now are standards being applied to this area. I guess to sum up, whereever you make a selective pressure whether with antibiotics, disinfectants or homeopathic/herbal remidies, evolution will select resistant variants that will be able to outgrow those being inhibited. Hope this helps.

    • Photo: Matt Bilton

      Matt Bilton answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      I think that plants and herbs can contain extremely useful chemicals that could be turned into extremely useful drugs. Aspirin is a prime example of a drug which comes from willow tree bark that has been used safely by many people for many years. So I think research that looks at compounds created by nature is extremely important.

      Homeopathy is slightly different as it is based on the idea that water retains memory of chemicals that used to be in it, even when the chemical has been diluted so much it is no longer there. This goes against what is known about physics, and there is a lot of research already that shows homeopathy doesn’t work better than a placebo – so personally I don’t think more research should be done into homeopathy! But if after speaking to their doctor people want to use homeopathy as well as prescribed medicine, I think that is their choice!

    • Photo: Robert Hampson

      Robert Hampson answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      That is a question that covers a lot of areas.

      Some herbal remedies have been subject to considerable research and have been shown to be ineffective, some have been shown to contain single active chemicals which can then be purified, assessed and analysed and can be used as drugs, some have been shown to be active due to a complex mix of chemicals. There are also many traditional medicines which have not had enough research performed on them to know whether they are effective or how they work.

      Obviously those that are ineffective will never become medicines, the remedies that contain a single active ingredient are often already medicines, the ones which work through a mixture of chemicals need further research (the government currently doesn’t like to approve mixtures for use as drugs as if there is a problem it is harder to spot, and evaluate). Traditional remedies which have not yet been analysed obviously also need research. The University of Nottingham has a large campus in Malaysia and the currently record many of the local traditional medicines, they then reproduce them and try to ascertain their effectiveness. Once an effect has been observed they also try to isolate active ingredients for further research. There are many research programmes like this throughout the world.

      Mainstream research has largely decided that homeopathy is only as effective as a placebo (in other words, you’d get the same result if you gave the patient sugar pills). However, placebos may be useful for doctors as many people come to the surgery with very mild infections expecting antibiotics. If the doctor prescribes antibiotics for these they are likely to contribute to making more antibiotic resistant bacteria, so it could be better for them to prescribe a placebo (a placebo has better results than taking no action). However, this would involve deceiving the patient and is not allowed under NHS guidelines, the Hippocratic oath, and for general moral reasons. Do you think that moral argument is reasonable?

Comments