Prof Baum and 12 other signatories – including Edzard Ernst, Britain’s ‘first professor of complementary medicine’ (family motto: ‘I have not come to praise alternative medicine, I’ve come to bury it’) – have written to the UK’s primary care trusts, urging them to stop offering alternative medicine.

Irony of ironies, the private letter was ‘leaked’ to The Times so that it could be publicised on the day that Prince Charles made a call at the World Health Assembly for a more integrated approach to medical care that embraced complementary medicine.

On the face of it, Prof Baum’s exhortations seem like the voice of reason itself. After all, why should public funds be wasted on therapies that clearly don’t work? According to Baum, “unproven or disproved treatments are being encouraged for general use in the NHS”. This statement is true, as virtually no surgical procedure has ever been scientifically tested, and most drugs have very limited value, as GlaxoSmithKline has admitted. But Baum isn’t talking about conventional medicine. He’s referring to homeopathy, which he describes as an ‘implausible treatment for which over a dozen systematic reviews have failed to produce convincing evidence of effectiveness’.

This is untrue. In the past 24 years there have been 180 controlled, and 118 randomized, trials into homeopathy, which were analysed by four separate meta-analyses. In each case, the researchers concluded that the benefits of homeopathy went far beyond that which could be explained purely by the placebo effect. Another meta-analysis found that 65 of the 89 trials analysed had produced an effect way beyond placebo.

Worse, Baum and co have uncovered an‘overt promotion of homeopathy in parts of the NHS, including the NHS Direct website’. This will come as a surprise to the NHS, whose website actually states: ‘It is difficult to assess how well many complementary therapies actually work, as there is little clinical evidence available’. In fact, the NHS repeats Baum’s claim, and it certainly doesn’t read to us as an overt promotion. The statement may also come as a surprise to a medicated nation, 99 per cent of whom have never been offered alternative medicine by their doctor or consultant. (Untypical day in the oncology unit: ‘Hhmm, I was thinking of giving you aggressive chemotherapy for your cancer that’s now in its third stage, but actually there’s a zesty little homeopathic remedy called Rhus Tox that I’ve taken a bit of a fancy to.’)

Baum and chums also need to keep a sense of proportion. Of the £70 billion spent on the NHS every year, just £3m has been spent on researching complementary therapies and, of that, £324,000 on alternative cancer care.

Of course, the whole thing is a storm in a test tube. Prof Baum is not the most popular of figures in the NHS, mainly for his continual attacks against the breast-screening programme. The NHS has gone on record to state that Baum “would do well to check the relevance of the facts he quoted which are 25 years out of date. . .this is yet another case of Prof Baum launching unnecessary attacks.”

Now we can add another one from the increasingly marginalized Baum and Ernst.