Homeopathy can treat chronic pain, but researchers don't know how

• A Canadian doctor who has been practising homeopathy for more than a decade says the controversial therapy can help people whose pain isn't adequately controlled with traditional medication.
• Homeopathy takes the approach of "like cures like."
• It involves giving extremely small doses of substances that produce symptoms of illness in healthy people when given in larger doses.
• The treatments can be so dilute that not one molecule of the original substance is left.
• Dr. Stephen Malthouse, a doctor and homeopath in Victoria, B.C., says that while homeopathy can treat pretty much any type of pain, the approach is holistic, and the pain is seen as a piece of the larger jigsaw puzzle that is the person's overall health.
• He gives the example of a 50-year-old woman who experienced burning foot and leg pain, accompanied by numbness in the extremities.
• When the patient came to see Malthouse, he did a complete history and was told the woman had an allergy to sulfa-based drugs.
• According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a U.S. government research funding agency, homeopathy has been subject to controversy and debate because a number of its key concepts do not follow the laws of chemistry and physics.
• In particular, scientists do not understand how something that causes illness might also cure it, and they question whether a remedy with a very tiny amount of active ingredient (perhaps not even one molecule) could have a biological effect, beneficial or otherwise.
• Studies of homeopathy have been contradictory in their findings, the centre states.
• Some analyses have concluded there is no strong evidence supporting homeopathy as effective for any medical condition.
• However, others have found positive effects from the treatment.