European Union

This review gives a summary of the definitions, delimitations and principles of homeopathy and its potential mechanisms of action, which is followed by an overview and critical evaluation of the most important homeopathic drugs registered for treatment of animals. It is shown that several of the marketed homeopathic drugs for treatment of animals violate current drug laws and represent a risk for both the animals and the consumer of food produced from animals.

The European Union and the European Council are interested in the phenomenon "Homoeopathy". At the initiative of a member of the European Parliament, Mr. Paul LANNOYE, the European Commission created a study group with the aim to answer the question: "Is Homoeopathy researchable?" After 18 month, the group, including conventional pharmacologists and researchers using daily homoeopathy, answered affirmatively to the question.

Integrative medicine (IM) has become a major challenge for doctors and nurses, as well as psychologists and many other disciplines involved in the endeavor to help patients to better tolerate the burden of toxic therapies and give patients tools so they can actively participate in their "salutogenesis." IM encompasses psycho-oncology, acupuncture, and physical and mental exercises to restore vital capacities lost due to toxic therapies; furthermore, it aims to replenish nutritional and metabolic deficits during and after cancer treatment.

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: Studies on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), like those of other systems of traditional medicine (TM), are very variable in their quality, content and focus, resulting in issues around their acceptability to the global scientific community.

While medicine has made remarkable progress over the last decades, its development has also raised numerous ethical and legal issues. In this context, the question arises as to what framework is needed for research, organ transplants, and medically assisted reproduction. A balance has to be found between scientific freedom, the imperatives of public health and the protection of people ' welfare, rights and human dignity. Those questions have led to the adoption of multiple national laws as well as ethical and legal norms at the international level.

The aim of this paper is to examine educational inequalities in the risk of non-employment among people with illnesses and how they vary between European countries with different welfare state characteristics. In doing so, the paper adds to the growing literature on welfare states and social inequalities in health by studying the often overlooked 'sickness'-dimension of health, namely employment behaviour among people with illnesses.

Unemployment insurance is an important social protection policy that buffers unemployed workers against poverty and poor health. Most unemployment insurance studies focus on whether increases in unemployment insurance generosity are predictive of poverty and health outcomes. Less work has used theory-driven approaches to understand and explain how and why unemployment insurance works, for whom, and under what circumstances. Given this, we present a realist synthesis protocol that seeks to unpack how contextual influences trigger relevant mechanisms to generate poverty and health outcomes.

There has been vigorous debate over the use of placebo controls in clinical trials in human subjects where active treatments are already in widespread use. The debate has extended from the use of placebo controls in trials of products for AIDS in developing countries to the use of placebos in trials in conditions such as mild hypertension, asthma, depression, chronic stable angina etc. Some have argued that placebos can never be justified where an active treatment exists.

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: Studies on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), like those of other systems of traditional medicine (TM), are very variable in their quality, content and focus, resulting in issues around their acceptability to the global scientific community.

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: GP-TCM is the first EU-funded Coordination Action consortium dedicated to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) research. One of the key deliverables of the Work Package 7 in GP-TCM was to investigate information of the existing requirements for registration of TCM products listed by global regulatory bodies. The paper aims to collate data and draw comparison of these regulations. Case studies are also presented to illustrate the problems involved in registering TCM products in different regions worldwide.