With a bit more humility and a genuine spirit of scientific inquiry - qualities that in my experience are quite rare among doctors - that senior doctor might have paused to ask why patients like the so-called alternative therapies and whether that might not have been a valuable part of the treatment. A large part of it is undoubtedly the relationship that develops between therapist and patient.

My problem is not with complementary therapies - I've had both acupuncture and osteopathy (although I've never quite understood why osteopathy sits outside the mainstream) and both have been successful.  But then I can understand the rationale behind them, and can accept intellectually how they might work.  The thing that intrigues me is that a treatment like homeopathy, whose rationale seems to me to be scientifically indifensible, can have a real effect.  Does one have to be a believer?  I'm assuming that since I cannot accept the scientific validity of homeopathy, it wouldn't work for me.  And it's that element of faith that I find troubling; but, again, perhaps in a genuine sense of scientific enquiry I shouldn't, since at another level I'm saying that we need to understand more about the relation between mind and body.

I'm certainly not going to defend pill-pushing doctors.  Big pharma seems to me to be a much greater menace than any complementary therapy - and pharmecutical companies are prepared to invest vast amounts in courting individual GPs because the rewards are worth it. The issue of side-effects is crucial too - it seems to me that replacing one form of illness with another is not really health.

The credible argument I mentioned is related to some work I was involved in some years ago to investigate why road casualties were falling.  Over the previous twenty years, Governments had done a number of things - drink-drive campaigns, road safety awareness, improving vehicle safety standards, better speed enforcement, better care for accident victims.  The question that was being asked by policy-makers was - which of these were the ones that really did the trick cost-effectively?  And the answer we came up with was that you could never know, because it simply wasn't possible to disaggregate the effects of the different parts of the mix to form a general conclusion.  The question was a methodological non-starter.

Hopefully somebody with a more complete understanding will be along soon to clarify, but essentially, the founder of homeopathic medicine observed that minute doses of toxic substances could produce the same symptoms as larger, more damaging amounts, but without causing evident harm.
He then reasoned that by stimulating the body to react against something that wasn't actually dangerous, the body's own healing mechanisms (poorly understood at the time, and possibly not completely understood yet) could be goaded into action, directed by the nature of the homeopathic medication.

Which doesn't sound implausible, until you consider how minute the doses are. Homepathic preparations are made by diluting the active substance by a factor of 100. Then you take the result and dilute it by 100 again. Then again. And again. And again, and...

The more you dilute, the more effective the preparation is supposed to be.

Common commercial homeopathic remedies can be diluted to one- 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of their original concentration (30 lots of diluting by 100). Some can be diluted even more.

At these sort of concentrations, it is statistically doubtful that you are actually getting anything except water in your homeopathic medicine bottle.

The thing which has long since intrigued me, being too thick to understand it fully, was that long ago in the journal of Environmental Engineering there was a report about a water purification system which was supposed to be producing as nearly as possible 100% pure water by filtration. The test engineers were baffled that their results persistently indicated much higher levels of contamination than predicted despite very effective filtration, and I wondered at the time whether the difficulties they were experiencing were related in some way to the homeopathic principle.
At this distance in time I forget whether / how the problem was finally resolved.

No, it's not really an explanation at all. I'm inclined to suspect that the important factor is that the homeopath will have a much more detailed and rounded picture of a patient and his/her condition than a GP ever will, and has been trained to interpret that information more "holistically".

I am naturally very sceptical about these things having worked as an analytical chemist but I do know that my Dad suffers from a bad back and acupuncture does help him, usually almost immediately following a treatment.  I also know at least another 2 people who have had that for various ailments and it has helped immensely.  Although I was offered it to me when I was diagnosed with arthritis, they decided that it probably wouldn't work so I didn't receive any needles and was given nasty NSAIDs instead (which it turns out i'm not supposed to take because of IBS).

Regarding homeopathy, I remain to be convinced of the benefits of treating someone with something which is, to all intents and purposes water; but I can see the benefits of the "Placebo effect" and maybe this comes into it a little as the human brain is far more complex than we can possibly imagine.

It would be interesting to compare the results of a microdosing study to those of homeopathy (with the same active ingredient) and see if the Pharmokinetic data results were similar.

Ruby, can you post the name or PM me with details of those sleeping tablets?

Thirded! I could have done with a few last night. Absolute rubbish sleep Yawn.