Jeremy Sherr – a Rath in the making?

Via Ben Goldacre’s miniblog I have come across this blog from the homeopath Jeremy Sherr.  Mr Sherr is a Fellow of the Society of Homeopaths (SoH), found and principal of the Dynamis homeopathic school and a subject of one my earliest blog posts.  That post was critical of Mr Sherr’s stated aims of carrying out trials investigating the effectiveness of homeopathy in treating AIDS and malaria.  This prompted me to email both Mr Sherr and the SoH  expressing concerns.  Mr Sherr did not reply although the SoH did stating that as he was a Fellow rather than a Member he was not bound by their code of conduct.  At that time Mr Sherr was only planning his trials, he is now carrying them out in Tanzania.

When I was in South Africa 5 years ago, we had designed a very complex trial together with the Nelson Mandela hospital in Durban. This trial had three arms; patients with homoeopathy and without ARV treatment, patients with homoeopathy and ARV treatment, and patients with ARVs alone (Placebo treatment is considered unethical in AIDS). It was a very comprehensive and well designed trial and it covered all the bases. And once the dean of the hospital resigned to go into the private sector, it was also a very dead trial. So I am happy to go for a simple trial initially, with one arm of AIDS patients with homoeopathy and no ARV. There are plenty of statistics on ARV treatment and patients with no treatment at all that we can compare to. If we can prove that homoeopathy has any positive effect at all, we can move on to bigger and better things.

As has been pointed out in the comments to Sherr’s blog post not only is the very concept of his trial unethical on grounds that homeopathy is implausible, depriving HIV+ people of ARVs harms their health but that the design is so flawed it will not reveal anything as there is no control group.  In my original post I drew attention to this quote from Mr Sherr concerning ethical approval for such experiments:

You have to find willing partners and get a protocol through an ethics committee, and you need to talk their language. I hope it will work but if not, I will just go and do it on a small scale myself – I am determined to do that.

Mr Sherr is incredibly arrogant and so convinced of the efficacy of homeopathy that he is prepared to step outside ethical strictures and submit terminally ill patients to his absurd trials.  This raises chilling parallels with Matthias Rath, the vitamin pill salesman whose rogue theories helped contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in South Africa and beyond.  The only thing that differentiates Sherr’s ideas and experiments from Rath’s is the number of people involved.  I can only hope that Sherr abandons his project sooner rather than later.

Criticism of Sherr will not come from within his profession, not only do the SoH refuse to criticise him but they to have flirted with the idea that homeopathy can treat aids, on World Aids Day no less, an idea that caused an avalanche of criticism at the tail end of 2007.  An idea that the SoH have not repudiated, preferring instead to raise the drawbridge and cower in their bunker rather than take active steps to prevent the worst excesses of the profession.  It might be hoped that some criticism comes from the British Homeopathic Association (BHA), the organisation that represents medical homeopaths, but they too have carried articles supporting the use of homeopathy in AIDS treatment and do not seem keen to criticise non medically qualified homeopaths.  There is no culture of self-critcism within homeopathy and certainly no serious discussion of research ethics.

Efforts to stop Sherr will also not come from within Tanzania, thanks to the efforts of Mr Sherr’s friend – Sigsbert Rwegasira:

Sigs explained about the Tanzanian law that support homoeopathy and other traditional medicines; Traditional and Alternative Medicine Act No. 23 of 2002. You can read it on

http://www.lrct.or.tz/documents/23-2002_The%20Traditional%20and%20Alternative%20Medicines%20Act,%202002.pdf

Sigs has been the main force behind this law, and he made sure that it was done properly and safeguards homoeopathy and just about every other major alternative medicine.

The prospect of such quackery becoming enshrined in law in a developing country  where 6.5% of the population have AIDS, is chilling.  6.5% is a comparatively low percentage when South Africa, home to Rath’s worst excesses, is considered but if Sherr’s ideas spread and people choose to abandon ARVs and precautionary measures in favour of homeopathy then the consequences could be terrible.

I have expressed my concerns to the UNAIDS country coordinator for Tanzania by email and will update this post should he reply.  I would be grateful if any readers could recommend people to contact or suggest other ideas for preventing the spread of dangerous ideas and practices regarding human experimentation involving alternative therapies and serious diseases.

*update*

As well as UNAID I have now also contacted the institutions referred to in the following passage from the Dynamis website and asked them about the nature of their involvement and whether or not a research proposal was assessed by an ethics committee.

We have the support of several eminent homeopathic researchers, as well as the Muhumbili University of Health Sciences in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and the Department of Integrative Medicine at the University of Maryland, USA.

[BPSDB]