By Paul Rodgers

If it were up to me, magic would work. Much of my teens were spent in an imaginary land full of elves and dwarves, steeped in the lore of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Who could resist the idea that waving a wand or drinking a potion could solve life’s problems?

As an adult, though, I found that magic doesn’t work, and science does. Yet the NHS, an institution that should be a bastion of science, continues to spend millions of pounds a year – for remedies, staff and the upkeep of four specialist hospitals – on homeopathy, a practice with no scientific basis whose origins lie in Renaissance alchemy. At best, homeopathy is an expensive placebo, but in leaching scarce resources from treatments that are effective, and by distracting patients from seeking proper medical care, it causes real harm. That kind-hearted Britons are being encouraged to give money to pay for a group of homeopaths to go to Haiti to treat earthquake victims is scandalous.

Let’s be clear. Homeopathy is not the same as herbalism, which has some scientific merit. Its main principle, that “like-cures-like”, dates back to Paracelsus, a 16th century physician, astrologer and occultist who believed that if you suffered from, say, stomach cramps, the cure should be something that causes stomach cramps. The problem – obviously, you might think – was that this “cure” often made things worse. Two centuries later, Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, realised that diluting the like-cures-like medicines reduced their toxic effects, though not, he claimed paradoxically, their efficacy.

And so homeopathy was born. Minute doses of the active ingredients are diluted so much that your chance of finding even one atom of it in your pricey sugar pills could be as low as one in a trillion. Exotic explanations for this vary widely, often involving the sort of pseudoscientific gobbledygook that is the stock in trade for Star Trek scriptwriters. One common idea is that water can “remember” which active ingredient used to be present (though apparently it forgets the myriad other contaminants that have been removed). As David Colquhoun, a professor of pharmacology at University College London, put it: “If homeopathy worked, the whole of chemistry and physics would have to be overturned”. Even some of the purveyors of these snake oils don’t have much faith in them. Paul Bennett, the professional standards director at Boots, one of the country’s biggest homeopathic retailers, admitted in November that “I have no evidence before me to suggest that they are efficacious.”

The Commons Science and Technology Select Committee – which reported on 22 February on its investigation into this “alternative therapy” – concluded that public funding for this hocus pocus should be cut. Even research into it should be abandoned as a waste of money. The MPs should go further. Homeopaths should be held legally responsible if they prescribe their placebos for conditions which demand proper medical attention. In Australia, two homeopaths, husband and wife, were jailed last autumn for gross criminal negligence over the death of their nine-month-old baby in 2002. The baby had severe eczema and died of septicaemia after her parents tried to treat her homeopathically. Even the placebo effect doesn’t work on babies.

Homeopaths will counter that they have several centuries worth of experience during which they’ve given their tonics to patients who have subsequently recovered. The flaw here is clear. Just because a treatment precedes a recovery does not mean it caused the recovery. Often patients seek help when their symptoms are worst, when the only way they could change is to get better. The argument that, in a free country, people should be allowed to choose what therapies they take is stronger, but only if patients are told the facts about those nostrums. And once they know that they’re getting a placebo, its effectiveness will mostly crumble. It has also been suggested that homeopathy helps GPs divert chronic time-wasters. Convenient, perhaps, but dishonest; like magic potions, lies have no place in a doctor’s black bag.