Cedric can’t explain how he is feeling. Nor can he say whether his new arthritis treatment is working. In fact, Cedric can’t talk at all. That’s because he is a horse. If this horse could talk, he might be able to save everyone a lot of trouble.
Five-year-old Cedric is on the frontline of a row over the role and suitability of the homeopathic treatment of animals. The latest salvo in the war of words was fired by an Edinburgh-based locum vet, Danny Chambers, who this month submitted a petition to the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS), the regulatory body for vets, urging it to “blacklist” the homeopathic treatment of animals, labelling the practice ineffective, misleading and dangerous.
“I’ve been writing letters about this to the Veterinary Times for the last three years,” says Chambers, whose petition attracted more than 2,500 signatures, including more than 1,000 vets. “Homeopathy is one of those alternative medicines that has a legitimacy. Most people don’t understand what it is, but it’s not seen like crystal healing or other alternative therapies. If you went to the doctors with diabetes and they sent you to a crystal healer, they would be doing you a disservice. I’m not anti-homeopathy but it has been disproven. Conventional medicine can’t fix everything, but it’s not fair to give people hope for something that doesn’t work and charge them for it.”
Around 50 of the 22,000 vets in the UK who are licensed by the RCVS practise homeopathy. Based on the principle that “like cures like”, homeopathy claims to treat ill health by administering diluted forms of plants and minerals. In May, Prince Charles told a conference that he treated animals on his organic farm with homeopathy as well as conventional medicine. “We have been successfully using homeopathic – yes, homeopathic – treatments for my cattle and sheep as part of a programme to reduce the use of antibiotics,” he said.
On a farm in Oxfordshire, Chris Day stands under Cedric’s head, his hands reaching up to the horse’s neck. “Well out of alignment there,” he pronounces. Cedric is led on a brief trot across the yard. “He’s not lame, but he’s going to go lame if we don’t do something about it.”
Day, 69, qualified as a vet in 1972 and has been practising ever since, offering what he terms a holistic approach, treating the “whole animal” with an array of approaches, from chiropractic to dietary advice. “We use all sorts of different tricks,” he says, “and homeopathy is one of them, and a very potent one.”
He sits on a bale of hay to consider the latest attempt to prevent the use of homeopathy on animals. “This debate has come around every year for 200 years,” he says. “I can understand why the people who oppose it don’t study homeopathy. I can understand why they don’t want to understand homeopathy. What I can’t understand is this refusal to accept that there might be something there. All the animals I see are failures, they are referred to me because conventional veterinary treatment has failed. If an animal I see responds, then we have done something. How can I do this for 40 years and not be uncovered as a fraud? Word would get out.”
Chris Day, son of vets, came to homeopathy at an early age. “It was so off the wall that I thought: either it works or these people are completely fraudulent.”
He insists his early adoption of homeopathy was not to satisfy some youthful sense of rebellion. “At college in the 60s, when they were tearing down the gates, I was defending the gates. I was an establishment person. My whole practice has been put on a very professional basis because I am not a rebel. It’s been much harder for me this way.”
The membership-based British Veterinary Association is firmly opposed to the use of homeopathy. “The BVA cannot endorse the use of homeopathic remedies, or indeed any products making therapeutic claims, which have no proven efficacy; the consequence could be serious animal health and welfare detriment because of the lack of therapeutic effect,” said John Blackwell, its senior vice-president, last month.
The British Association of Homeopathic Veterinary Surgeons, meanwhile, dismissed the charges in the petition to the RCVS as unfounded. “It is nonsense to suggest that homeopathy has been proven to be ineffective,” it said. “It is clear that this campaign is neither rational nor professional. It attempts to remove from the veterinary domain a vital form of medicine which affords relief to patients when other therapies are ineffective, and it attempts to do so by spreading misinformation.”
The RCVS, while yet to produce a formal response to the petition, believes homeopathy should be used alongside conventional treatment, rather than as an alternative. In a statement, it said: “Homeopathy is currently accepted by society and recognised by UK medicines legislation and does not, in itself, cause harm to animals. While this is the case it is difficult to envisage any justification for banning a small number of veterinary surgeons from practising homoeopathy.”
Cedric’s owner, Jan Tilling, has been a client of Day’s for 20 years. “Animals don’t know what you’re giving them, yet homeopathy works.” But in an article published in New Scientist last month, Chambers argued that homeopathy had “no effect beyond the placebo” and animals did not experience this effect.
Day smiles again. “The philosophies clash,” he says. “Wouldn’t the placebo effect be a wonderful thing if it were at work? Why should we discard that?”
