The homeopath convicted of manslaughter and the responsibilities of the companies in the sector

In the end, homeopath Massimiliano Mecozzi was convicted of manslaughterfor now at first instance, three years’ imprisonment, five years of interdiction from the medical profession and the payment of a provisional salary in favor of the child’s family Francesco Bonifazi, who died in excruciating torment from the consequences of an otitis, because he was given homeopathic remedies instead of antibiotics of proven efficacy that are used in these cases.

We will see the reasons for the sentence in ninety days, but here I would like to recall some elements, which are part of the report that I delivered at the time as an expert in charge.

When it emerged that Mecozzi had opposed, with all his might, the administration of appropriate care, causing the death of the childSIOMI (Italian Society of Homeopathy and Integrated Medicine) and SMB Italy (Medical Biotherapy Society) immediately intervened, issuing a joint statement on May 27, 2017, in which, commenting on the death of Francesco Bonifazi, they wrote at the end: ” In the specific case, in addition to reiterating that the child should always be treated by a pediatrician and, in the case of homeopathy, by a pediatrician also expert in homeopathy, we reiterate that no doctor can afford to make homeopathy the exclusive cure of a health situation, even acute such as that of the little one. However, one cannot mistake a case of, possible, malpractice of medicine with medicine. Otherwise for every adverse event that occurs every day in surgery or medicine in a hospital or in the territory the same rule should be applied ”.

With this press release, it was intended to relegate Mecozzi’s work to bad medical practice (or, rather, homeopathic)the only possible culprit in the death of Bonifazi.

Nevertheless, the statement rings false: the president of the SMB had in fact written in an article published in a special magazine dedicated to homeopathy, about the treatment of otitis in children, as follows: “It is certainly comforting for the Homeopathic Doctor to read this information on work carried out by serious researchers who are free from commercial pharmacological logic. Faced with the abuse made of antibiotic therapy, homeopathic remedies turn out to be gods valid substitutes“.

Note well: homeopathic remedies, in pediatric otitis, are presented as substitutes, not as supplements, of antibiotic therapy, except that, after the death of little Bonifazi, to exempt homeopathic pseudoscience it was written that this should not be used as an exclusive cure.

There is more: cases identical to that of the little Bonifazi, that is, cases of children with otitis who died following the administration of homeopathic treatments instead of real treatments, are well documented in the judicial news of various countries, such as Australia and the United States. As these cases show and as I argued in my report, therefore, even before the death of Francesco Bonifazi – even just two years earlier – the inherent danger of preferring useless homeopathy for the treatment of pediatric otitis to useful therapies was documented; but yet, even downstream of some of these cases, the leaders of important homeopathic societies and their training schools still wrote that homeopathic medicines were “Good substitutes” for antibioticsdemonstrating what is actually hidden behind the ambiguous words on the role of “integration” that homeopathic practice should have.

It is therefore even more species that those high-ranking exponents of the Italian homeopathic community then want to reduce the Bonifazi case to a case of “malpractice” of a homeopath: the reality is quite different, and it is that homeopathy and its system of thought, being alternative, and not complementary, to modern science, actively favor the abandonment of effective therapies, in favor of preparations that have no possibility of action, if not through the placebo effect.