Funding for pseudosciences: the Tuscany case and homeopathy

When it comes to health policy, legislators and public administration are required to pay maximum attention to the evidence regarding the effectiveness and safety of a treatment, for the consequences that wrong choices can have both on the well-being of citizens and on their pockets, if pseudo-cures, pseudosciences and treatments are financed that draw on magical thinking or obsolete visions of medicine. The reality, unfortunately, is very different, and this can be clearly demonstrated by looking at the legislative acts of the public administration themselves.

Let’s consider the Tuscany region for example, and the support that the administration of that region has always provided, regardless of who governs it, to a pseudoscience such as homeopathy. To continue using public money and to defend the choice from a health point of view, administrators and politicians declare: “we follow the scientific evidence”. So let’s look at these so-called scientific proofs of the advantages of homeopathic treatment.

Let’s consider, for example, executive decree 19664 of 2021 which approved the “Diagnostic, therapeutic and healthcare path” of “Integrated medicine for cancer patients”. With this decree, the region intended to include things such as homeopathy in the services provided to cancer patients, committing “the companies and bodies of the SSR to comply with the indications and apply their contents”.
An “integral and substantial” part of this act of the regional administration is the attached document, produced by a specific technical-scientific committee, which should also contain the “scientific evidence” of effectiveness referred to many times. On the basis of three scientific articles, on page 14 of this document it is stated: “Homeopathy has highlighted the improvement in the quality of life in women with breast cancer or various neoplasms (115-116). The Frass study demonstrated a significantly higher quality of life even in patients with lung cancer (117).”

Now, Frass’ clinical study, theoretically a double-blind controlled study, has long been demolished by the scientific community; above all, as the Austrian Research Integrity Agency ascertained in its specific report for 2022 (case 2021/10), “through a very elaborate and exhaustive investigation, which included the on-site examination of the original documents , the commission was able to corroborate suspicions of falsification, fabrication and manipulation of data.” It is no coincidence that Frass’ work has long been reported as unreliable even by the same magazine that published it.
For the other two articles cited in support of homeopathy, they are two small studios, the first on just 45 patients, full of bias, while the second, on 90 patients, concludes by stating that the effect on the patients’ quality of life “deserves further investigation”. Coincidentally, the main author is Frass himself, who intended to “crown” these preliminary data with his subsequent manipulated study. Furthermore, in the same ten lines of the document that contain references to homeopathic waste paper, we find the virtues of astragalus extolled, supported by a 2017 publication made by Tuscan researchers; It’s a shame that, coincidentally, this too was retracted due to obvious problems.

Now, perhaps a new technical document will be produced to replace this obviously flawed one with which it was decided to move public money on questionable practices and based on fraudulent or otherwise false scientific articles; and so, for the two or three years needed on average to discover any new problematic data, it will still be possible to maintain that the Tuscany region “follows the scientific evidence”. It is enough to know how to choose experts, technical committees and articles, and any political agenda can find support.