2018 has seen intense activity by HRI’s Rachel Roberts and Dr Alexander Tournier in countering misrepresentation and distortion of the evidence base on homeopathy within the international political arena.

HRI has continued to give input into the Ombudsman legal challenge to the Australian NHMRC’s Homeopathy Review, a process which has been ongoing for close to 2.5 years.

Political pressure on the Australian Government is mounting, with questions being put to NHMRC in the Australian Senate and the global Release The First Report petition (demanding NHMRC release their buried first report on homeopathy) attracting over 70,000 signatures from over 100 countries. Sign up here to add your voice.

The European Academies’ Scientific Advisory Council (EASAC) published a Homeopathy statement in September 2017. HRI has worked closely with European colleagues to engage directly with EASAC to discuss the scientific flaws in their document. In April 2018, HRI (represented by Dr Alexander Tournier and Rachel Roberts) and WissHom (represented by Prof Klaus von Ammon and Dr Susanne Ulbrich-Zurni) met with EASAC President, Professor Thierry Courvoisier.

This was followed in November 2018 by an online meeting between homeopathy sector experts (Rachel Roberts – Chair, Dr Alexander Tournier, Dr Angelina Mosley, Dr Robert Mathie and Penny Viner), EASAC’s Chief Executive (Dr Christiane Diehl) and all major authors of the Statement (Dr Robin Fears, Prof. Dan Larhammar, Prof. Jos van der Meer and Prof. Volker ter Meulen).

Discussions with EASAC are ongoing and a ruling on the Ombudsman investigation into NHMRC’s review is due by March 2019.

Further details will be posted on the HRI The Homeopathy Debate webpages in 2019, as and when it becomes appropriate to share more information in the public domain.