Sceptics plan to overdose on homeopathy pills tomorrow

On January 30, we'll be able to watch, hear, or read what happens when a substantial number of people take an overdose of homeopathic remedies in a concerted effort to end other people's freedom of choice to take the pills or drops they prefer.

There is no reason to believe that this will be the last installment in the homeopathy wars, but this one is well thought out and - what's even more important - it is very media-genic; as in photogenic. As the Guardian reported on the 29th, hundreds of homeopathy sceptics around the UK are going to publicly take overdoses of homeopathic pills at 10:23 tomorrow (British time) in order to prove - so they say - that homeopathy does not work. One of the activists, Martin Robbins, explains why he is one of these people who will demonstrate the ineffectiveness of homeopathic remedies, and why they do so outside shops of the store-chain Boots. Mr. Robbins writes the following: "... our aim is to demonstrate to the public in the strongest way possible that these pills, sold to poorly customers by companies like Boots have, literally, nothing in them.

Boots for one sells homeopathic remedies even though it admits that there is no reason to believe they are clinically effective. Some may argue that homeopathy is harmless, but that simply isn't the case. The pills themselves may be ineffective, but their impact on public health can be toxic.

When the UK government ploughs more than £4m of taxpayers' money into homeopathy annually, and leading pharmacists stock their magic potions, it serves to legitimise the industry, to suggest that somehow homeopaths are on a par with real doctors.

The consequences of that can be disastrous, whether it's the suicide of a patient who should be taking antidepressants, delayed treatment for a serious illness, or a traveller packing "anti-malarial" pills that don't actually work. As the reader can feel, Mr. Robbins is a man who has nothing but the best at heart for the poorly, those misguided souls who live with the totally wrong assumption that they can choose to use any remedy they want to, medicate themselves according to their own insights or preference; be they conventional or alternative, modern or more than a hundred years old.