Homoeopathy is no more an unfamiliar word in Pakistan but a very low percentage of people using it know that the way its products are advertised and marketed in Pakistan shows our successive governments’ disinterest in the matter as compared to the policy and approach of the governments in other parts of the world, including the United States of America and the European Union.
Such a practice, on the one hand, has led to quackery among homoeopathic doctors and on the other, given rise to self-medication among the users of homoeopathy. A situation that suits and benefits only the manufacturing companies.
A survey of any of the markets selling homoeopathic medicines in any major city would show all types of nostrums with wide-ranging claims being sold in homoeopathic medical stores. Name any disease, and the free booklets available with these shops for free dispensation would suggest two or three drugs.
According to a modest estimate, 80 per cent of locally manufactured and 25% of imported medicines are not prepared in accordance with the principles of homoeopathic pharmacy as they contain several ingredients mixed in low strength while homoeopathy advocates use of just one SINGLE remedy (not multi-ingredient or patent medicines) at a time.
Almost all homoeopathic manufacturing companies, local as well as foreign, manufacture some disease-specific medicines by mixing 4 to 10 single homoeopathic medicines in low strength. Such medicines are usually marketed under a Number Series. Small book-lets giving short descriptions of diseases and their treatment by these so-called homoeopathic NUMBERS are freely available in print as well as on the web.
The problem with these numbers is that they contain homoeopathic ingredients but the method of their preparation is not that of homoeopathic pharmacy nor do they meet the standards for strength, quality and purity as set forth in any recognized Homoeopathic Pharmacopeia (British, German, American, Indian or Pakistani). Further, there is no dependable scientific study to support the claims about the efficacy and safety of these Numbers.