Assessment of homeopathic clinical trials on infectious and parasitic diseases

Among the clinical trials with homeopathic remedies published in the literature, it was not found an adequate evaluation of their quality.This was the reason for the present study, performed on clinical trials involving patients with infectious or parasitary diseases. Literature was reviewed on electronic data-bases, reference lists of the selected studies, specialists and institutions were consulted. In the evaluation of the quality of the selected studies it was employed a modified scale of Jadad, ranging from 0 to 9. From 132 trials selected, only 18% met the criteria of inclusion; among them, there was good concordance (K=0.76%) in the assessment by 2 external reviewers. Considering the median punctuation (=5), 55.6% of the trials were considered of good quality, with limit values between 5 and 9. Even taken into account the need to improved the scale employed, the results indicate the need of further and more methodologically rigorous studies in this field.