When Science Becomes Political

Few people have fought harder for homeopathy in Australia than Gerry Dendrinos. As the current president of the Australian Homeopathic Association (AHA) and a practicing homeopath and herbalist based in Canberra, Gerry has spent the better part of a decade uncovering one of the more troubling episodes in Australian public health policy. When I spoke with him on Homeopathy Hangout, what emerged was a story that deserves far more public attention than it has received.

How Gerry Found Homeopathy

Like many homeopaths, Gerry came to the discipline through personal experience rather than a straight career path. After completing a science degree at the Australian National University and spending a year researching malaria, he found himself dealing with anxiety and depression. Conventional medicine and psychology offered little relief. A visit to a herbalist and homeopath changed everything.

“Homeopathy held the space,” Gerry explained. “It could cover everything I was going through, whereas nothing else could.” He went on to study both homeopathy and herbal medicine, and has been in clinical practice for over 22 years.

Gerry also shared a fascinating historical footnote: his early research into malaria had unknowingly connected him to the very origins of homeopathy. Samuel Hahnemann first developed the principle of “like cures like” after experimenting with cinchona bark, which was used as a malaria treatment in the late 1700s, and found that it produced malaria-like symptoms in a healthy person.

The NHMRC Report: What Actually Happened

In the early 2010s, Gerry was working part-time at the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) while also running his clinic. Almost immediately, he found himself in the middle of a controversy: the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) had produced a draft statement on homeopathy that was leaked to the media, and it was decidedly negative.

What followed, as Gerry pieced together through years of Freedom of Information requests and independent scientific analysis, was deeply concerning. Here is what the investigation revealed:

• In 2012, the NHMRC hired a contractor from the University of South Australia to review the evidence on homeopathy. This researcher had completed over 81 previous reviews for the NHMRC and had co-written their own guidelines on reviewing health evidence.
• Her final draft report found positive evidence for homeopathy in five or six medical conditions, with other areas rated inconclusive or lacking sufficient data. In other words, her findings were not comprehensively negative.
• Within three days of submitting that report, her contract was terminated. The positive findings were never disclosed to the public, and the $70,000 spent on the review was not reported in any annual reporting.
• A second contractor was hired in late 2012. Their initial findings were also not wholly negative, which again posed a problem for the NHMRC.
• Between April and July 2013, the NHMRC systematically rewrote the research protocol and retrofitted the data to a new set of rules, designed to produce a finding of “no reliable evidence.”

Two specific rules were introduced retrospectively. First, a study had to include at least 150 participants to be considered reliable, a threshold Gerry describes as having never been used before or since in this context. Of the 176 randomised controlled trials identified, 146 were immediately excluded under this rule. Of the remaining 30, a second rule eliminated all studies not rated at 100% quality, leaving just five studies. One was positive, four were negative, and the conclusion was that there was “no reliable evidence” for homeopathy.

“The analysis I’ve just given you is not in the report,” Gerry noted. “We had to do that ourselves, study by study.”

The Global Fallout

Because the report carried the authority of an Australian government body, governments around the world accepted it at face value. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, and Greece have all introduced restrictive measures on homeopathy that can be traced back, directly or indirectly, to this report and those built upon it.

In Australia, one of the most direct impacts was the removal of private health insurance rebates for homeopathy and 15 other natural therapies, effective 1 April 2019. Private health insurers themselves did not support the ban. In November 2020, Private Healthcare Australia wrote to the government calling for rebates to be restored. Even Health Minister Greg Hunt privately acknowledged in a meeting with the AHA that the policy was a mistake, though he indicated he needed political cover before he could reverse it.

The Fight Back

Gerry and the AHA have not taken any of this lying down. Their efforts have included:

• A formal Freedom of Information campaign to obtain the suppressed first review and related documents.
• A formal complaint to the Commonwealth Ombudsman, supported by whistleblower accounts from people inside government. That complaint has now been under investigation for five years.
• The creation of the Your Health Your Choice campaign, which has grown to over 116,000 supporters and successfully pressured government to establish new natural therapy reviews.
• A campaign in response to the Medical Board of Australia’s 2018 guidelines, which threatened to severely restrict integrative doctors. More than 10,000 personal emails were submitted through a public consultation portal, and the Medical Board backed down.
• Successfully preventing the TGA from banning homeopathic products following the NHMRC report.

Not every battle has been won, and Gerry is candid about that. The Ombudsman investigation is ongoing and has changed hands four times. Meanwhile, the NHMRC has commissioned a new review of homeopathy and has assigned it to the same contractor currently under investigation by the Ombudsman.

Why Is Homeopathy Such a Target?

It is a question worth asking: if homeopathy supposedly does not work, why is so much effort being directed at suppressing it? Gerry reflects on this thoughtfully, drawing on his five years inside the TGA.

“The people I worked with were great people,” he said. “Doctors, pharmacologists, pharmacists, medical evaluators. Really intelligent people. What I realised was that they become channeled down a certain way of thinking in their training, which is very intensive and goes on for years. They don’t see anything else. When you’re a hammer, all you see is nails.” He was careful to say this is not about bad intentions, but about the limits of a particular paradigm. Many of his former colleagues simply could not perceive outside that framework.

He also makes an important point about the claim that there is “no evidence” for homeopathy: almost no one making that claim has actually read the research. They are typically citing the NHMRC report’s bottom line, not the underlying studies. Gerry highlighted the work of the Homeopathic Research Institute (HRI), which he has worked with closely and which he describes as staffed by rigorous, top-level scientists who are honest about the limitations of poor-quality data and equally honest about presenting well-designed, positive studies that cannot be faulted.

Homeopathy’s Survival: It Starts at Home

Despite everything, Gerry is genuinely optimistic about homeopathy’s future. He points out that it is the most widely used form of natural medicine outside orthodox medicine in developed countries, and the second most used complementary medicine in developing countries. Countries including Russia and Brazil dismissed the NHMRC report outright. Switzerland went further and included homeopathy in mandatory health cover following a national referendum.

“Homeopathy has always been kept alive by mothers treating their children, and then treating themselves, and treating their family, and telling other people about it,” Gerry said. “That’s where change and survival starts: at the grassroots.”

When asked for his top three household remedies, he chose Calendula (particularly for post-surgical recovery, where he finds it works even better than Arnica when the skin and deeper tissues have been disrupted), Hypericum (a staple for nerve-related injuries in a house with three kids), and Hepar sulph (his go-to at the first signs of a cold or flu, especially when that telltale pre-illness crankiness sets in).

What You Can Do Right Now

Gerry’s ask of the public is straightforward and requires very little time:

• Sign up at yourhealthyourchoice.com.au and follow the Facebook page. When a new campaign is launched, you may only need to send one email through their portal to make a real difference.
• Consider becoming a general member of the Australian Homeopathic Association (search “Australian Homeopathic Association” to find the website). Membership gives you access to resources, a quarterly newsletter, and a journal, while also supporting the ongoing work.
• Visit the Homeopathic Research Institute website if anyone ever tells you there is no evidence that homeopathy works.
• Share what you know. Tell your friends and family. As Gerry puts it, use homeopathy, talk about it, and empower yourselves.

Homeopathy has survived suppression before. It has outlasted critics, outlasted bans, and outlasted bad-faith reports. But it does that because ordinary people, parents, families, and communities, keep choosing it, keep talking about it, and keep showing up when it matters.