Case reports
Homeopathic literature includes thousands of individual case reports describing successful homeopathic treatment. Articles in the media also present numerous patient accounts of how their health has been improved by treatment from a homeopath. These anecdotal reports are important in documenting the collective experience of practitioners and patients worldwide and demonstrate why homeopathy is such a long-established and well-used therapy. In terms of formal evidence, however, individual case reports have to be of exceptional quality in order to have much significance. For this reason well-formulated, large-scale clinical trials should be carried out.
Clinical trials
Clinical trials are experiments carried out on patients to compare the effects of two or more treatments under highly controlled conditions. RCTs -randomized clinical trials- have been used to investigate various aspects of homeopathy, such as how homeopathic medicines compare with placebo and how effective homeopathic treatment is for specific conditions.