A few nights ago, the BBC’s Newsnight programme called out a homeopathic pharmacy in London that is apparently vending sugar pills as protection against malaria. That is, water-kissed sugar posing as serious medicine.

Literature obtained from Ainsworths pharmacy in Marylebone boasts of anecdotal evidence for the pills’ efficacy in scaring off malaria. Sadly, there’s no clinical evidence for such an effect. Making assertions that alternative medicine is effective against deadly disease, when nothing of the sort has ever been reliably demonstrated, is unethical at best. At worst, people could die in the belief that they’re somehow protected.

The case is even more disturbing when you consider that the pharmacy is endorsed by the Royal Family. Ainsworths carries two royal crests on its web site.

Today, the story took a new twist, described by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society as ‘shocking’. A court case against three homeopathic practices has been dropped by the General Pharmaceutical Council, the regulator of such matters. The Council asserts that the pharmacies have taken ‘remedial action’ to prevent misrepresentation (the Newsnight investigation suggests otherwise) and that the allegations ‘fall below the current threshold criteria for referral to the investigating committee’.

It’s a worrying development, as articulated by Sense About Science, the campaign group who prompted the Newsnight investigation. Tracey Brown, Director of that organisation, says the decision puts lives at risk, effectively allowing pharmacies to market “useless homeopathic travel ‘vaccinations’ for diphtheria, malaria, polio, typhoid and encephalitis”.

None of this is particularly new or surprising. But I feel it’s our duty as scientists and rational thinkers to resist the march of unreason whenever lives are at risk due to belief-based, rather than evidence-based, medical practice.