Boiron (French pronunciation: [bwaʁɔ̃]) is a manufacturer of homeopathic products, headquartered in France and with an operating presence in 59 countries worldwide. It is the largest manufacturer of homeopathic products in the world. Homeopathy is a pseudoscience with no evidence of effectiveness for stated claims or plausible mechanism of medicinal effect. In 2004, it employed a workforce of 2,779 and had a turnover of € 313 million. It is currently a member of the CAC Small stock index.In June 2005, the firm acquired Dolisos Laboratories, then the world's second largest manufacturer of homeopathic preparations.Products of Boiron include mono- (Hahnemanian) preparations and poly-, which Boiron refer to as "Proprietary drugs". Several class action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of consumers claiming that Boiron's homeopathic products, including Children's Coldcalm and Oscillococcinum, are useless and Boiron's marketing of these products is deceptive.
Abstract The exhaustive identification of evidence is central to systematic reviews, but the screening of titles and abstracts remains particularly labor intensive. Priority screening, an active learning approach that ranks records by estimated relevance, has emerged as an effective strategy to reduce screening workload. Its efficiency is commonly quantified using work saved over sampling at 100% recall (WSS@100%), representing the percentage reduction in effort compared with random screening. Although modern priority-screening models achieve high efficiency on many benchmark datasets, some reviews still exhibit low WSS@100%, indicating suboptimal retrieval. Our study sought to improve the retrieval of all relevant articles in challenging datasets to ensure better generalization of priority screening. We first showed using SYNERGY benchmark datasets that while the most advanced ELAS_h3 priority screening model from state-of-the-art ASReview LAB v.2 open-source software, efficiently retrieved most relevant articles, it struggled with the rare, final ones in challenging datasets. To address this, we tested a hybrid approach entitled EdRoSi AI: using ELAS_h3 for early retrieval and then applying supervised fine-tuning to the biomedical transformer BioMed-RoBERTa-base with these relevant articles to enhance the detection of the remaining difficult cases. We found that fine-tuning BioMed-RoBERTa-base model with 10 late-identified relevant and 10 hard irrelevant study titles and abstracts, enabled faster retrieval of articles of interest compared to ELAS_h3 alone. This approach increased WSS@100% from 46.5% (SD 0.0%) to 83.3% (SD 0.4%), while adding only an average of 22 minutes of computational time for fine-tuning and inference. The EdRoSi AI priority screening pipeline could be valuable for situations requiring highest possible recall. It could be particularly useful in scoping reviews with broad or diverse topics where traditional priority screening methods may miss subtle relevance signals. Further work should define a data-driven stopping rule for ending screening once the fine-tuned domain-specific transformer is applied at the final stage and assess generalizability across additional challenging datasets.
Abstract Objective Influenza-like illness (ILI) is characterized by the sudden onset of systemic and respiratory symptoms such as fever, fatigue and myalgia, requiring prompt management. Anas barbariae 200K, a homeopathic medicinal product, is traditionally used to relieve flu-like symptoms. This study aimed to evaluate its efficacy in alleviating ILI symptoms within 72 hours. Secondary outcomes assessed symptoms relief, adverse effects, functional outcomes, compliance, and participant and investigator satisfaction. Methods This prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled multicenter superiority trial with two parallel groups was conducted in primary care in India in 2021. Children (6–12 years) and adults (18–65 years) with ILI symptoms for less than 24 hours were randomized to receive either Anas barbariae 200K (Oscillococcinum®) or placebo. Treatment was given three times daily for three days. The primary endpoint was the proportion of participants with alleviation of ILI symptoms within 72 hours following the initiation of treatment. Results A total of 707 participants received Anas barbariae 200K (n = 352) or placebo (n = 355). Within 72 hours, the Anas barbaria e 200K group showed significantly greater symptom relief than the placebo group (74% vs. 44.5%; p < 0.0001). Secondary endpoints also favored Anas barbariae 200K group, including faster symptom alleviation (46.7 vs. 67.3 hours; p < 0.0001) and shorter median time, estimated by KM analysis, to return to daily activities (4.0 vs . 6.0 days; p < 0.0001). No serious adverse events were reported. Conclusion Anas barbariae 200K significantly alleviated ILI symptoms within 72 hours, with improvements that were both statistically and clinically significant. Significant benefits were also observed across secondary outcomes, with no safety signal identified. This study showed that Anas barbariae 200K could be an effective and well-tolerated treatment for ILI symptoms. Trial registration Clinical Trials Registry of India, CTRI : 2021/02/031250, registered on February 12, 2021.
