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Assessing a treatment on the basis of an individual or a group. An example: the homeopathic treatment of digestive-tract strongyles in sheep

Abstract

Homeopathic treatments, widely used in organic farming, remain unevaluated. Assessment is difficult since the individuals that respond to treatment are not identified, although it is central to the concept of homeopathic treatment. Classifying lambs into those to be treated (since they have high parasitic infection rate or poor production performances) or that should remain untreated (in other words, even when treated, they will not benefit from treatment) is not simple. The identification of lambs to be treated can be based on parasitological examinations (eggs per gram of faeces), clinical (anaemia or diarrhoea)or production-related (weight gain) results. The classification of lambs was a posteriori and based on dendrograms using UPGMA (unweighted pairwise grouping on arithmetic average) and Gower’s similarity index. Parasitological, clinical and production identifiers were used for assessing the efficacy of Teucrium marum (9 CH) on digestive-tract strongyles. There was no reduction in gastro-intestinal infection in lambs with high infection rates or poor live weight gain

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