Abstract
Familiarity, objectivity – and misconduct: Counterstatement to Shaw DM. The Swiss Report on homoeopathy: a case study of research misconduct. Swiss Med Wkly. 2012;142:w13594
Highlights
David M Shaw recently published a critique of our Health Technology Assessment (HTA) on homoeopathy in this journal [1], which calls for a response
We expected a scientific debate to ensue on our chosen research methods and were surprised to be confronted with a biased mixture of false or incomplete citations, wrong matches and, as a consequence, incorrect conclusions that reveal a lack of familiarity and experience with both homoeopathy and the Swiss setting
“In 2011 the Swiss government published a report on homoeopathy.“ Reply: the original HTA-report was shown for some time on the homepage of the BSV/BAG, neither the German booklet of the HTA report [5] nor the English summarised version [6] or the English translation of the report [7] were published by Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (SFOPH)
Summary
Homeopaths believe that homoeopathy works, and as such have an inherent conflict of interest. Even if they are capable of objectivity, they have an obligation to declare this as a potential conflict of interest. Being homeopaths themselves, they clearly had a strong interest in producing a report that might motivate the Swiss government to rule that homoeopathy will in future be covered by the Swiss health insurance system...”. We collected information from experienced experts in homoeopathy (any other approach would have been careless and non-scientific). This has already been done by others [16]
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