The Great Beyond: Homeopathic treatment works! (But not in a good way.)

The Great Beyond: Homeopathic treatment works! (But not in a good way.)

Good news for proponents of alternative medicine: a paper published in a prestigious medical journal appears to demonstrate that a homeopathic remedy really does have a pretty powerful biological effect. Unfortunately, this effect is to rob some users of their sense of smell.

Concerns that popular ‘homeopathic’ cold remedy zinc gluconate can cause a loss of smell have been around for a while. Now an analysis by two San Diego researchers shows these concerns may be well founded.

Terence Davidson and Wendy Smith, of the University of California, San Diego, looked at a set of nine criteria* for establishing a causal relationship and concluded that zinc nasal therapy can cause smell loss (anosmia). Their paper also details 25 patients who turned up at their Nasal Dysfunction Clinic complaining of smell loss after use of homeopathic zinc gel – which, unusually for a homeopathic treatment, does have an active ingredient.

They are now calling on the Food and Drug Administration to step up and do something.

“Given the rapid expansion of the homeopathic drug market into a multimillion-dollar industry, it is clear that more stringent FDA regulation is needed to monitor the safety of these popular remedies,” they write in Archives of Otolaryngology.

“... Protecting our patients from the potential risks of intranasal zinc medications and other homeopathic drugs, especially ones with limited proven therapeutic benefit, should be a high priority of the FDA.”

Last year the FDA called for three specific zinc nasal sprays to be pulled from the market amid concerns over asnosmia. It said then it had received over 130 reports of smell loss associated with such products, which continue to be widely available.

Davidson and Smith’s paper notes that evidence zinc nasal sprays help with colds is “questionable”.