How old was the booklet? It couldn't have been referring to
this. could it?
I doubt it.
In recent years there have been a number of so-called controlled trials published by a group in Germany, showing positive effects for homoeopathy. The protocol is very clever. Instead of using an inactive placebo as a control, they use a licensed medicine. This seems justified because many new trials of real drugs take this approach - first, because it may not be ethical to leave a group of people suffering from the condition in question without treatment of any kind, and second, because you really want to know if the new stuff is as good as or better than the regular stuff, rather than just trying to show it does
something.
However, the homoeopaths then get very clever. They choose vague conditions for which there is a licensed treatment which possibly has very little effect. There are things like that around. Serc for dizziness was one stroke of genius. I've also seen a homoeopathic back-rub shown to peform just as well as a non-homoeopathic back rub. That sort of thing. Thus, even if the homoeopathic treatment does nothing, it will perform as well as the licensed medicine! Whoopee!
Then they get even more machiavellian. They compare not just the remedies themselves, but the whole approach. Thus, the homoeopathic patient gets his hour-long symptom-matching ritual, plus a prescription for an inactive medicine. While the orthodox medical patient gets a quick five minutes and a presctiption for an inactive medicine. Done this way, you can often justify a claim that homoeopathy performs
better than real medicine.
They did a series of similar trials using that approach, and then published a meta-analysis of all of them. You'd believe that homoeoapthy was the secret to eternal life after reading that lot, I believe (I haven't seen it all).
We had a thread about this, and a lot of links were given and papers cited, and I can't for the life of me remember how to link to it. But it does sound as if it was this brilliantly conveived PR job that the booklet was referring to.
Rolfe.