Healthcare provided by a homeopath as an adjunct to usual care for Fibromyalgia (FMS): results of a pilot Randomised Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To assess the feasibility of a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) design of usual care compared with usual care plus adjunctive care by a homeopath for patients with Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). METHODS: In a pragmatic parallel group RCT design, adults with a diagnosis of FMS (ACR criteria) were randomly allocated to usual care or usual care plus adjunctive care by a homeopath. Adjunctive care consisted of five in depth interviews and individualised homeopathic medicines. The primary outcome measure was the difference in Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQ) total score at 22 weeks. RESULTS: 47 patients were recruited. Drop out rate in the usual care group was higher than the homeopath care group (8/24 vs 3/23). Adjusted for baseline, there was a significantly greater mean reduction in the FIQ total score (function) in the homeopath care group than the usual care group (-7.62 vs 3.63). There were significantly greater reductions in the homeopath care group in the McGill pain score, FIQ fatigue and tiredness upon waking scores. We found a small effect on pain score (0.21, 95% CI -1.42 to 1.84); but a large effect on function (0.81, 95% CI -8.17 to 9.79). There were no reported adverse events. CONCLUSIONS: Given the acceptability of the treatment and the clinically relevant effect on function, there is a need for a definitive study to assess the clinical and cost effectiveness of adjunctive healthcare by a homeopath for patients with FMS.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".