Can the plants believe? :-)
Homeopathic treatment of Arabidopsis thaliana plants infected with Pseudomonas syringae.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19468651?ordinalpos=15&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

So how did homeopathy cure so many people in the Cholera epidemic in 1854?

How did homeopathy save the lives of many from swamp fever in Cuba in 2007?

If water memory is so incredible, why is it held to be credible by Nobel Prize winner Brian Josephson?

Why do people favor the work of a magician of dubious ethical standards (backing out of a deal with Vithoulkas then blaming Vithoulkas for said failure) over the work of advanced physicists such as Conde, who concluded that water have a memory?

And why on earth is the argument “it’s just so obvious that water has no memory” repeated as if it’s actually worth saying? For the longest time, people concluded it was “just obvious” that germs didn’t exist.

Thanks for the cartoon and the freethunk website.
I shall have to peruse that.

So its time to stop mentioning the placebo effect as if it were some secret flaw in the medical profession. Think of it as an added bonus…. you may have a slight increased chance of being cured based on the placebo effect, but that works across the board.. medicine, homeopathy, prayer, animal sacrifice, etc. In other words, stop pretending medicine is based on the placebo effect. It makes you look ignorant and possibly even deceptive.

Of course, if people use homeopathy or any other kind of useless healing as an alternative, rather than a supplement to conventional life-saving medicine, this kind of result is inevitable. Thankfully, few people are that phanatic in their delusions.

Oh and I do agree with you basic premise – I mean what on earth are the NHS in the UK doing spending 10s of millions of pounds on this rubbish.

People who are in need of medical attention need real treatments grounded in evidence-based research. Homeopathy absorbs the limited trust and funds of such people for a procedure that, at best, gives false hope and placebo … but at prices significantly higher than a sugar pill and a kind word. All too often, however, the damage is much greater.

The limited funds of these people should be spent on actual medicine, and their trust should be placed in procedures that have evidence (repeatable, demonstrable, and factual) backing them up.

If you would like to familiarize yourself with some of the bad things that are wrought in the name of homeopathy, you can begin by checking out whatstheharm.net. This is an online resource that catalogs the harm caused by various woo-woo beliefs and alternative medicine scams. Here’s the specific page accounting some the victims of homeopathy:

http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html

At current, homeopathy can be shown to have caused 3,254 deaths, 235,558 injuries, and over $455 million dollars in damage. That doesn’t seem very “harmless” to me.