The Swiss Government – through their Social Insurance Office (FSIO) – have just published the results of their report on Homeopathy, commissioned in 2006.

Its conclusion is that Homeopathy is a valuable addition to conventional healthcare. This conclusive finding overturns previous negative studies in Switzerland from authorities like the Swiss Complementary Medicine Evaluation Programme (PEK).

Rather than take the rigid, schematic and exclusively quantitative (negative) outcome approach of PEK, or the meta-analytical and systematic approach of the Cochrane Collaboration, the new study looks not just at the effectiveness of a particular homeopathic intervention, it also looks at the effectiveness of homeopathy in everyday use.

So it has taken into account the real world effectiveness of homeopathy in terms of how it is used, its safety and its cost-effectiveness.

In the report the authors comment on the Shang et al 2005 study on Homeopathy and explain that : “We can say with certainty that the Shang et al 2005 study does not prove that homeopathy has no effect.”

The 300 page report, looks at all the scientific literature in homeopathy and summarises 22 reviews, 20 of which show positive results for homeopathy.

Four of these show strong evidence that homeopathy, as a system of medicine, is efficacious.

The English translation of the Swiss Health Technology Assessment (HTA) report on Homeopathy is called ‘Homeopathy in Healthcare: Effectiveness, Appropriateness, Safety, Costs.’and is printed by Springer.