Speaking in Belfast some years ago the chair of the meeting handsomely sang my praises as a Morning Star columnist, but there was a sting in the tail of his introduction. “The only thing Peter gets wrong,” he declared “is his attitude to homeopathy.”

I’ve never had any time for this particular form of quack medicine and never more than now when many homeopathic so-called doctors are offering to cure autism. Parents of autistic children understand that this isn’t a disease to be cured but a condition making children different but not ill.

The good news is that the Advertising Standards Agency has made such adverts illegal.

Exactly a year ago our wonderful National Health Service (NHS) decided it would try to remove any treatment by homeopathy from the services it offered. It now recommends that GPs and other prescribers should stop providing it although a small number still do.

The NHS made its decision because they found no clear or robust evidence to support the use of homeopathy.   

I had always based my opinion of homeopathy on numerous scientific articles and reports, not least a 2010 House of Commons science and technology committee report. It said that the principles on which homeopathy is based are “scientifically implausible” and that in medical trials homeopathic remedies perform no better than placebos or dummy treatments.

So what is homeopathy? Homeopathy is based on a series of ideas developed in the 1790s by German doctor Samuel Hahnemann (pictured). His central principle of treatment is that like cures like — that a substance that causes certain symptoms can also help to relieve or even remove those symptoms.

Hahnemann also used really heavy dilution of the supposedly health giving substances into a mixture of alcohol and distilled water, dilutions sometimes by up to a trillion to one.

Some homeopaths believe that even after such ultra-dilutions the original substance leaves an “imprint” of itself on the water. Some homeopathy practitioners even believe counterintuitively that the more a substance is diluted in this way, the greater is its power to treat symptoms.

Many homeopathic remedies are diluted to such an extent that it’s unlikely there’s a single molecule of the original substance remaining in the final remedy. In cases like these, homeopathic remedies consist of nothing but distilled water.

The healing substances are often chosen from something that would in stronger doses cause the symptoms complained of. This echoes the basis of the homeopathic principle that like cures like.

The final mumbo jumbo of Hahnemann’s technique was “succussion,” the vigorous shaking of the diluted preparation and even banging the vessel it was being mixed in on a hard surface.

The good doctor even invented another new word to describe this mixing process which he claimed greatly increased the potency of his potions. He called this potentisation.

A Canadian practitioner claimed she cured a four-year-old boy of extreme aggression with a homeopathic remedy using rabid dog saliva

Today the multi-million pound homeopathy industry sells complicated and expensive machines that carry out the succession and the potentisation without any human intervention.

Homeopathy is used in an extremely wide range of conditions, including physical conditions such as asthma and psychological conditions such as depression.

One recent and contentious claim for homeopathy came from a Canadian practitioner, Dr Anke Zimmermann, who claims she cured a four-year-old boy named as Jonah of extreme aggression with a homeopathic remedy using rabid dog saliva.  

She claimed that “within a minute or two of giving him the remedy, Jonah smiled at me very broadly and beautifully, as if all the lights had just gone on.”  

In answer to widespread criticism Zimmermann said that homeopathic remedies are: “harmless sugar pills medicated with something like an energetic information of the substance.”
The ideas that underpin homeopathy aren’t accepted by any branch of mainstream science, and aren’t consistent with long-accepted principles on the way the physical world works.

Today homeopathy is mostly practised privately and homeopathic remedies are available from specialist pharmacies. In Britain the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) advises the NHS on the proper use of treatments and, currently, it doesn’t recommend that homeopathy should be used in the treatment of any health condition.

There’s no legal regulation of homeopathic practitioners in the UK. Anyone can practise as a homeopath, even if they have absolutely no qualifications or experience.
So why has this particular branch of quack medicine remained so popular and remained a financial cost to the NHS for so long?
Simply because it has long enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the royal family.
The late queen mother, her daughter our present Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and many other royal hangers-on have all sung the praises of homeopathic so-called medicine.

The Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital was established in 1849. King George VI allowed it to add Royal to its name in 1948 when it joined the NHS.
It became a favourite cause of the Queen Mother and then her many descendants. Prince Charles, as you might expect, became one of its loudest champions.

Since 2010 it has become the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine and since April of last year it no longer offers NHS-funded homeopathic treatments.

Homeopathy does work I am sure, but so do placebos and the power of the human brain to make you feel better after taking a remedy the patient really does believe in cannot be doubted.

What worries me, however, is when some practitioners also claim homeopathy can prevent malaria or other diseases. There’s no evidence to support this and no scientifically plausible way that homeopathy can prevent diseases. This is both irresponsible and dangerous.

If people want to use unscientific alternative medicines that is up to them, as long of course that they don’t involve killing and grinding up the body parts of tigers, rhinoceros or other rare and threatened species – and that they pay for these alternatives themselves rather than add to the costs of the already hard-pressed NHS.