Homeopathy put to the test

Homeopathy is more popular than ever. But now an extraordinary scientific experiment claims to prove what cynics have said all along - that homeopathy simply does not work.

The unprecedented test is set to ignite fierce debate over whether millions of people are wasting their money on a medicine that's all in the mind. James Randi, the American magician and escape artist, feels so strongly that people are being conned by homeopathy that he has offered $1 million to whoever can prove that the therapy works.

Randi, an arch-sceptic, devotes his life to investigating and demystifying pseudoscientific claims - including spoon-bending and spiritualism - and has been involved in the homeopathy debate for many years: "I am just interested in discovering the truth," he says.

His challenge, untested for many years, has finally been taken up by BBC2's Horizon documentary makers. In a series of experiments carried out by some of the country's leading medical experts and scrutinised by officials from the Royal Society, they set out to test one of the founding principles of homeopathy.

Homeopaths believe that like should be treated with like. So, for example,
to treat a cold they use a remedy based on onions, because onions produce the streaming eyes and nose typical of a cold.

But the controversial part of the theory is the principle that the more you
dilute a remedy with water, the more effective it becomes. A single drop of the remedy is diluted so many times that it is the equivalent concentration of much less than one drop of the original remedy in all of the oceans on Earth. This is where the conflict with mainstream science really resides. Homeopaths insist their remedies have healing powers; scientists say there's not a single molecule of the original chemical in the solutions homeopaths use.

One popular theory for why homeopathy sometimes appears to work is the so-called placebo effect. In conventional drug trials as many as 40 per cent of patients who are given a placebo improve because they believe that the medicine they are taking will make them better, even if it is just a sugar-coated pill.

Homeopaths insist that their treatments have been used with great success on children and babies - who are too young to have developed a placebo response. Another aspect of the treatmentis that patients often get a lengthy, detailed consultation, in sharp contrast to the rushed seven minutes you usually get with a GP. Sceptics believe this relieves patients' stress and makes them feel better.

But there is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence that says it does work. Louise Hamilton a 29-year-old human resources officer from Clapham, has endometriosis. She has endured 15 years of crippling pain and has had three operations and hormone treatment to alleviate her suffering without success. Eventually the pain got so bad she could not walk.

"All I could do was lie on my left side - I could only work for three hours a day." For the past 18 months she has had homeopathic treatment and is now free of pain. "I'm convinced it works. I suffered for 15 years and now I feel so good I've not had to see my homeopath since last May."

Professor Madeleine Ennis, an expert in pharmacology at Queen's University Belfast, became embroiled in the homeopathy debate after she performed a laboratory test where histamine - a natural hormone - was diluted to homeopathic levels and the solution added to a blood cell to see if it "activated" the corpuscle in the way histamine normally would.

The results were mystifying. The diluted solution could not have had a single molecule of histamine in it, yet it still had an effect on the cells. Professor Ennis repeated the test and got the same result. She stands by her method, but cannot explain why it worked. The Horizon scientists repeated Professor Ennis's experiments under strictly controlled conditions. For homeopaths, it was a crushing defeat.

The experiment revealed that homeopathy has no physiological effect on the body. James Randi got to keep his $1 million and the hundreds of thousands of people who rely on homeopathic remedies will be left wondering if it's they who are out of pocket.

The Society of Homeopaths, which boasts around 2,000 members, insists the Horizon experiment is not the end of the story. "Our results come from treating human beings and animals," says the society's director of politics Melanie Oxley. "There have even been experiments involving plant cells which showed an effect. We need to invest more in homeopathy research because we do see an effect on living systems."

Homeopathy: The Test is on BBC2 on 28 November at 9pm.