Homeopaths challenged to substantiate claims, flounce off in a huff

Here's something interesting I saw on the New Scientist website the other day. There's £10,000 on offer to the enterprising homeopath who can provide convincing evidence that homeopathy actually works. All the practitioner would have to do is submit homeopathic medicines to a clinical trial, where half of the patients receive the homeopathic preparation, half a placebo.

Apparently, a spokesperson for the Alliance of Registered Homeopaths is offended by the suggestion that somebody might want to actually test the claims made for homeopathy. "We have nothing to prove, and certainly not to people with closed minds," a representative of the homeopaths' trade association spluttered.

They can refuse to submit their claims to rigorous scrutiny if they want, but I'm not convinced by the homeopaths' refusal to be tested, any more than I am by Labour's refusal to debate civil liberties in the by election triggered by David Davis' resignation. In both cases, the official position is "we're not going to dignify this stunt by engaging in the contest" - i.e. they're already losing the debate and are reduced to the PR equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears, singing "la, la, la, not listening" and chanting "we're not talking to you, you smell," having run out of rational arguments.

I've got two particular grounds for wanting the homeopaths to "put up or shut up":

1. I've no scientific training, but even I can grasp that one of the basic claims of homeopathy is quite astonishing. Homeopathic remedies contain just a trace of the active ingredient, being diluted down to a level where, often, not a single molecule of that ingredient remains in the solution. In other words, homeopaths claim to be able to treat medical conditions with something that no existing form of chemical analysis can distinguish from distilled water. If true, that would be amazing.

If of water really retains a "memory" of substances it has once been in contact with, eventually some chemist will be walking off with a Nobel Prize for demonstrating this effect in a reproducible experiment, and rewriting the text books. It might happen, but I'm not holding my breath. Extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary evidence.

To borrow an example, if I met somebody at a party who told me that he drives a Ford Fiesta, I probably wouldn't question his claim - I've seen many people driving Ford Fiestas with my own eyes and, as Tom Jones would say, it's not unusual. If I met someone at a party who told me that he drives an interplanetary flying saucer, I might be a bit more skeptical. I haven't seen anybody driving a flying saucer and I don't believe that a such a thing as a workable flying saucer exists - as far as I know the nearest thing ever created was a cool-looking Canadian prototype flying disc called the Avrocar, which was cancelled after a few wobbly test flights demonstrated that the craft was unstable when it got more than a few feet off the ground. So as far as I'm concerned, the homeopathic space cadets have got something to prove; either show me your flying saucer, or bugger off back to the mother ship.

2. As someone who pays my National Insurance contributions (with a brief interruption - I've been between jobs for the past two weeks, but start my new one on Monday), I'm paying for some of this stuff. As the British Homeopathic Association boasts here, homeopathy has been available on the National Health Service since the NHS was founded in 1948. There are, apparently, five NHS Homeopathic Hospitals and some General Practitioners will refer patients for homeopathic treatments.

Resources in the NHS are stretched notoriously thinly, so I would expect the minimum standard for a treatment which is funded by public money to be some convincing evidence that it works better than a placebo. As far as I'm aware, properly-conducted trials have never been able to demonstrate this. Until they do, homeopaths, you do have something to prove to all of us whose money funds homeopathy on the NHS and to every patient denied an effective treatment, tested in clinical trials, because some of the money which might have paid for it went to publicly funded homeopathy instead.

So, homeopaths, take up the challenge, prove yourselves right, the skeptics wrong and rub our noses in it if you like. If you can't, then put your toys back in the pram and play nicely.