Your first point: PLOS ONE is generally an excellent journal. However, I question if this article received adequate peer-review because it is so full of assumptions that users of homeopathy and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) have anti-scientific worldviews. Ultimately, the authors' own survey disproves their assumptions, though the authors seem to ignore what their own data finds.

1. This is a misreading of the article. You claim that we assume that users of CAM have anti-scientific worldviews. We do not assume this at all. The premise is that, particularly in the UK, the public discourse surrounding the use of homeopathy portrays a scientific community – based on references [12-16] – that is generally anti-homeopathy. Such studies have led to recent recommendations to the UK Parliament that homeopathy should not be made available via the National Health Service. This is the context that we establish in the introduction. Given this high level public debate on homeopathy which portrays the consensus within the scientific community as not supporting homeopathy as an efficacious treatment, we then pose a very simple empirical question - to what extent does the public align with this position. We neither assume or assert anything about the views of the general public in the UK, but rather seek to explore the relationship between beliefs in science and beliefs in homeopathy given that the scientific community in the UK are portrayed as being overwhelmingly against its use.


Your second point: Further, the authors go as far to say extreme assertions such as, 'It is clear that use of CAM is very widespread throughout the general population which, of course, reinforces the pertinence of arguments about its potentially malign effects on public health. It is NOT clear that use of CAM or homeopathy lead to malign effects on public health, and the authors do not provide any evidence that this is true.

2. The word 'potentially' is important here. It is true that the clinical efficacy of CAMs, especially homeopathy, have not been consistently demonstrated, therefore there is a potentially malign effect if people take such medicines as a way treating a health problem when they do not potentially work. So, to repeat, it is clear that given the widespread use of CAMs, and given that some are controversial because there is evidence to suggest that they do not possess efficacy, or at the very least the evidence is mixed, then there clearly is a potential for malign effects if people use them instead of more conventional forms of treatment.


Your third point: The authors state, there is little or no evidence to support the contention that homeopathy can be a useful and safe complement, let alone alternative to, conventional medicine, and they cite a study on therapeutic touch for this verification!?!

3. Yes, thank you for pointing this error out. The reference should not be there, and indeed, no reference needs to be there as we are summarising the findings of previous reports and clinical trials which we cite in references [6], [12-16], [17-19] and [20] found in the previous paragraph.


Your fourth point: The authors also assert that homeopathy has no plausible underlying mechanism, but it is clear that the authors have chosen to ignore or remain ignorant of the body of research that is now presenting compelling evidence for how and why homeopathic medicines and the nanoparticles remaining in their solutions can have profound effects on biology and physiology (see references below).

4. We submitted the final draft of this article for publication on 2/11/12, and two of the references you cite were published within 10 days prior to this date. So this is not clearly a case of choosing to be ignorant or choosing to remain ignorant but clearly an issue of timing. The only remaining reference which we did not cite was your publication back from 1999.

To summarise the nature of the article: it is true that Homeopathy is a controversial treatment; it is true that it has been widely reported as such throughout public domains; it is that there are clinical trials which testify that it is not an efficacious treatment, and that the UK Parliament was recommended to not make it publicly available. As such, we then decided to explore to what degree the UK public aligns with the often reported prevailing scientific position that homeopathy is not efficacious. We have no vested interest in promoting or criticising homeopathy, and we have not assumed anything about users of homeopathy. Instead, we used survey data to explore the relationship between attitudes towards science and homeopathy given the high level of controversy surrounding its usage.