DURBAN University of Technology’s interim executive dean in the faculty of health sciences, Prof Ashley Ross, has together with a group of international health experts written a topical paper which was recently listed on the World Health Organisation (WHO) website.
This is a pat on the back for Prof Ross and 13 other homeopathic researchers, epidemiologists and clinicians from USA, UK, Argentina, India, Italy, Belgium, Greece and Turkey, for a job well done. The aim of the study, titled Data Collection during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Learning from Experience, Resulting in Bayesian Repertory, which was based on Bayes’ Theorem, was to discover the relationship between specific symptoms and specific medicines, especially of symptoms occurring frequently in the Covid-19.
The research commenced in May 2020 and was led by a very well-regarded Dutch researcher, Dr Lex Rutten. The case collection and analysis was conducted over a period of five months. The findings were that the Likelihood Ratios (LRs) of common symptoms such as ‘fatigue’ and ‘headache’ provided better differentiation between medicines than did existing repertory entries, which are based on the presence or absence of symptoms. A mini-repertory for Covid-19 was published and supported by a web-based algorithm. With a case of 20 common symptoms this algorithm produced the same outcome as a full homeophathic analysis based on a larger number of symptoms, including some that are traditionally considered more specific to particular medicines
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“The original paper was published in the journal, Homeopathy (formerly the British Homoeopathic Journal) in January 2020. WHO listed the paper on their website on 1 February 2021, under the heading Global literature on coronavirus disease,” Prof Ross said.
Seeing the listing of this paper on the WHO website left Prof Ross filled with tremendous excitement. “It is no secret that homoeopathy is very erroneously regarded in some quarters as being ‘unscientific’, so it was indeed both exciting and an honour that our work, which is extremely painstaking and accountable, was recognised as being worthy of dissemination by the WHO,” said Prof Ross.
The Covid-19 paper (and the app that was developed alongside it [https://hpra.co.uk/]) is one of two international collaborations on Covid-19 that Prof Ross is currently engaged in. He is also working on the CLIFICOL project, which is a much bigger case analysis project, expected to yield a number of papers.
This project is using case reports to explore much more fundamental homeopathic concepts, while producing a very detailed record of the homeopathic treatment of Covid-19 across the globe. The project seeks ultimately to analyse 10 000 successful cases and is expected to be published later this year.
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