Is homeopathy really hogwash?

It didn’t occur to me until a few weeks ago to question homeopathy. Of course it worked. I grew up with it; my aunt Liz was and still is a homeopathic practitioner and for us — my mother, father, aunts, uncles, brother, cousins — calling Liz was the natural reaction to the slightest swollen gland. We weren’t loopy: if things got dangerous, a trained doctor would be summoned but as he tapped and tutted, the aunts would hover, a copy of First Aid Homeopathy in Accidents and Ailments by Dr D.M. Gibson to hand. My childhood memories are full of the taste of little sugary pills — ‘There, open wide, let it dissolve on your tongue’ — and the rhythmic clinking of remedies being beaten into water with a hundred stirs of a silver spoon. The sound of science.

None of us would ever have questioned the efficacy of homeopathy because, over the years, we saw it work.