Liz,

Before this ends up as a rant fest, let me tell you of one example where an expensive bottle of water would have caused more damage that the homeopathy that worked.

A member of my family from an early age was a perpetual bed-wetter, a nightly ritual with a daily wash load. Trying ALL of the traditional methods of resolving this problem, repeated trips to doctors, specialists for many years, the lot resulted in NO BENEFIT at all.  I think you would agree a bottle of water would be the last thing you would prescribe for this problem.

After some eight years of this chronic issue and two months on homeopathic arsenic the problem was resolved.  Let me tell you, placebos were tried.  Maybe we were lucky and the point when we tried the last resort arsenic was just the same time when the body was going to sort itself out, but you will forgive me for thinking that might be a bit of a stretch, possibly the same stretch you are asking us to take to accept as academic rigor anything that appears on a Wiki.

Just a thought.

Ian

In response to Paul's assertion that I display a "lack of understanding of how homeopathy works": I would say that I have a good understanding of how homeopathy purports to work. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy

Apologies that all the links here are to Wikipedia - at least it has not been victim to hacking (Now is that just a coincidence? Until evidence to the contrary, a skeptic would prefer to think so.)

My comment that it would be as effective to drink tap water accords with the outcomes of many independent studies of how homeopathy purports to work, often in those words or very similar.

In individual situations it can be very difficult to disentangle causation from coincidence or correlation. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

There are also different levels of evidence for different types of "alternative medicine", which is why I feel that it is unhelpful to bundle them altogether when considering just one of them. Some other types of "alternative medicine" would suffer a loss of deserved credibility if portrayed as being "like homeopathy" in terms of evidence for either efficacy or effectiveness. 

Personally, although I do not believe that there is any evidence whatsoever for the claims made by homeopathy in terms of it's "remedies", I do believe that there is value in the type of client-focused contact it typically provides.

For this reason, I encouraged my very skeptical mother to take up a suggestion from a mutual friend that she visit a homeopath who she had visited. This was at a time in my mother's life when I felt that she would benefit from this sort of consultation, ie. not from the "remedies" that would be recommended. This was not on the NHS as I do not think homeopathy was available on the NHS at that time, certainly not where she lived.

My mother had several long-standing health problems that had been both managed and mismanaged by the NHS. There was no suggestion at any time, from myself, our friend or the homeopath that she should swap allopathic treatment, eg. insulin injections for diabetes, for homeopathic treatment and she would have never have given credence to any such advice anyway. 

My mother was initially troubled by what she felt was an excessive and inappropriate interest in her life and personal circumstances but I encouraged her to persist. After a couple of consultations she warmed to the practitioner and felt that it was helpful to talk to him. After four consultations she felt that she had had enough, in a good way. She felt that it had been a very positive experience and would recommend it to others - but not to waste any time and money on the "remedies", which she never took.

I find it encouraging, and think it is worthwhile and money well spent, that there are research projects and clinical trials seeking to identify and disentangle any effects of homeopathic consultations from any effects of homeopathic remedies.

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