It is arguably difficult to "prove" that "homeopathy works"; in the same way that it is difficult to prove that "antidepressants work".  Proving whether treatments work or don't work in the area of human health is fraught with extraordinary complexity, and is not something to be tackled by a half hour journalism "exposé".

Homeopathy is undoubtedly a healing method that uses an unusual premise - namely that a natural substance that can cause certain symptoms, when diluted sufficiently, can be used to remove those same symptoms.  This dilution factor increases rather than decreases the potency, and it is precisely because there is not a molecule of the original substance remaining that homeopathy purports to work.  No one would deny that this is an absolutely strange and foreign concept.  However, you cannot prove whether it works or not with a scientific model that has the opposite point of view - namely that increasing doses of a substance have an increasing beneficial effect!

The program gave more camera time to a bunch of crackpots standing outside a Vancouver Hospital trying to "prove" that homeopathy is useless by swallowing large amounts of a substance that has "nothing in it" than they did to a reasoned and balanced discussion of a 200-year-old healing method.

In 1988, the head immunologist at INSERM in Paris France, the late Jaques Benveniste, discovered that he could reproduce the 'dilution effect' in the laboratory.  In a complex series of experiments, extraordinarily well controlled, he showed that in diluting a solution of human antibodies to the point that there was virtually no possibility that a single molecule remained, that the effect on human white cells was just as though they had encountered the original antibody.  His article was published in the well-known medical journal Nature.  What followed were scathing attacks on a reputable scientist who lost his reputation and his grant money as a result.  Since then there have been many attempts to replicate his work, some of them successful and some not.  This is common in the scientific community.  The concept of a dilution effect remains controversial but not irrefutable.

I use this example not to support or deny the benefits of homeopathy, but only to exemplify the kind of emotional reactions we have to what we do not yet understand.  The reaction of the scientific community was quite "non-scientific", emotional, and destroyed any understanding we might have gained of what would be considered an unusual phenomenon.

The only support that I would give to the Marketplace program is that it did uncover one of the heinous aspects of science - the idea that we can cure illness, particularly chronic illnesses like cancer.  Nobody should ever claim that cancer can be cured - and this includes the highly debatable modern "scientific" treatments using chemotherapy and surgery.  None of these has ever been subject to a double-blind placebo controlled study - the so called 'gold standard' for proving therapies.  The outright hypocrisy of this is not called attention to by the Marketplace program.  The program also calls attention to the fact that the homeopathic "vaccines" are claimed to be as good as regular vaccines.  I have never seen support in the literature for that particular claim.  However, I have seen much support in the literature for claims that homeopathy works for a number of quite severe complaints of a variety of dysfunctions.  I don't think anybody has ever measured how much harm might come from substituting regular vaccines with homeopathic vaccines; although we do know that harm can certainly happen from regular vaccines - another factor not mentioned in the CBC Marketplace program.

Likening homeopathy to taking a placebo is an argument without dialectic.  Scientists who study placebos understand that absolutely everything has a placebo effect - upwards of 30% or more.  The implication in the program is that homeopathy is a placebo, whereas nothing that is orthodox has a placebo effect which is also misleading and invective.

The CBC program also, I believe, did inestimable harm to the federal government's responsible program of regulation by suggesting that only products that have been proven to be "cures" should be regulated.  This is absolute unmitigated nonsense.  Just go to your local drugstore and look at all the cold remedies that sit on the shelves that people buy by the truckload!  None of these has ever been proven to work, (in fact many of them have been shown to have no benefit), and yet they are regulated, promoted, advertised and consumed by thousands people!  Let's not fool ourselves - the ability of the scientific community, (often aided and abetted by multinational pharmaceutical companies with a lot of money to spend and profits to be made), to actually prove anything is severely limited by our simplistic and outdated model of healing and science.

I am seriously disappointed that Marketplace and The National insists on sensationalist tin-pot journalism to denounce a whole healing approach in what was 30 minutes of diatribe.  They should stick to denouncing and rooting out consumer products and high cell phone bills and stay away from complex issues that require more thought and deliberation than could possibly be contained in a 30 minute magazine program.  Shame on the CBC!