"A dumping ground for hypochondriacs"

Back to the issue of homeopathic "medicine": Nick is on form in his Observer column today. I particularly liked his description, which is the title of this post, of how GPs use homeopaths. I wouldn't normally recommend you glance at the bizarre intellectual underworld of the comments threads provided by "Comment is Free"; note, however, that advocates of crank "medicine" behave like the advocates of the "dianetics" invented by the Scientologists. If you're a journalist with a sceptical message, you'll generate an anguished and immediate response.

The scandal of homeopathy is its appropriation of public funds for purposes that are at best useless, but more widely the recognition that this pseudoscience enjoys in public policy. Homeopathy is not a science, like medicine, but a faith. A democratic society takes no view on origins, eschatology and immortality, and is indifferent to what its citizens believe on these matters. (As private citizens, by contrast, we're fully entitled to have views on what others believe, and must be free to express our ridicule for religious dogma without any social restraint let alone legal sanction.) By making provision within the NHS for homeopathic institutions (I decline to refer to them as hospitals) and bogus treatments the state accords a privileged status to a particular faith. That's iniquitous as well as feeble minded.