At 10.23am on Saturday, alternative medicine and science went to war. Their weapon? A pill. For one side, the pill was a potent remedy. For the other side, the pill was just sugar wrapped in superstition. To prove it, nearly 400 sceptics gathered across the world and took a mass overdose of a homeopathic remedy prescribed for sleep.

The overdose, organised by Britain’s Merseyside Skeptics, was a protest against the sale of homeopathic pills in the pharmaceutical chain Boots. The Skeptics claim that Boots is profiting from a treatment known to be useless.

Homeopathy is a hot topic in Britain, whose National Health Service (NHS) is increasingly relying on the advice of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). NICE, which evaluates medical treatments, controversially ruled that a liver cancer drug widely used in Europe didn’t offer enough benefits for the cost. So at the same time the NHS was denying a drug to seriously ill patients, it has been spending up to £4 million a year on homeopathy.

Homeopathy isn’t any old alternative therapy – it’s the most scientifically studied alternative medicine in history. And what those studies have discovered is that homeopathy doesn’t work – at all.

Homeopathy claims to work on the principle of ‘like cures like’. Its founder, the German doctor Samuel Hahnemann, devised homeopathy after he ate some cinchona bark, a cure for malaria. The bark gave him shakes and a fever – the symptoms of malaria itself – so he decided a tiny amount of something that mimicked the illness could cure it.

But Hahnemann went further, claiming that the more dilute the solution, the more powerful its effects. Today, homeopathic solutions contain none of the original substance – what patients are being dosed with is a simple sugar pill, or plain water. Homeopaths have come up with a range of theories on how water can acquire magical healing properties, but none stand up to scrutiny. At least the British Society of Homeopaths is honest enough to admit that “Specifically it can not yet be explained how it works”.

Homeopathy had fallen in and out of fashion in the past 200 years, until a French researcher called Jacques Benveniste published a 1988 paper in Nature. Benveniste was an immunologist, whose work on the effect of a very dilute substance on blasophils seemed to support homeopathy. Nature accepted his paper on the condition that his work be replicated – but the team Nature sent included the American magician and skeptic, James Randi.

The results couldn’t be replicated, but many scientists felt Benveniste had been badly treated. Throughout the early 1990s, a number of researchers tested homeopathy – sometimes with promising results.

By the mid 1990s however, the evidence had become overwhelming - homeopathy didn’t work. A 2005 Lancet article reviewed the medical literature and declared homeopathy’s effect was neglible.

But homeopathy didn’t go away. Today, the Brits spend £40 million a year on sugar pills, while the French and Germans between them spend ten times that amount.

Not only that, but the love of homeopathy seems to be getting stronger. When the UK papers reported the Merseyside Skeptics protest, their comments boards lit up with scorn. To take the objections one by one:

Homeopathy has effected miraculous cures.
As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data. The many miraculous cures can be explained by the placebo effect.

Unfortunately, mentioning the ‘placebo effect’ seems to inflame the debate, as though being susceptible to it is the same thing as being weak minded. In fact the placebo effect is not just a powerful and near-miraculous response from the body, it’s getting stronger – so we can expect homeopathic ‘cures’ to seem even more effective in the future.

Homeopathy works on animals - who aren’t susceptible to the placebo effect.

The studies that apparently support the veterinary use of homeopathy have all been debunked. So concerned were a group of vets about the rise in homeopathy, that they set up the satirical British Veterinary Voodoo Society.

Doctors use homeopathy.

Doctors can be just as impressed by the apparently miraculous placebo effect as anyone else. They may also be knowingly using it for the placebo effect.

Opposition to homeopathy is organised by Big Pharma.

How’s this for a question – who makes all those homeopathy pills? Who has the machines for turning out millions of pills in sterile conditions? Very big businesses, that's who.

Conventional medicine has killed thousands of people. Modern drugs are often toxic, or wrongly prescribed.

True. That doesn’t mean that homeopathy works. In fact, every drug in the world could cause spontaneous combustion – and homeopathy still wouldn’t work. That argument is what's known as a non sequitur.

Herbalism, acupuncture and other alternative remedies have been proven effective.

Certainly. Herbs definitely have active ingredients. But homeopathy isn’t herbalism and it doesn’t work. See non sequitur.

Homeopathy can’t be tested by scientific methods.

Which means it’s voodoo.

But at least homeopathy doesn’t do harm.

Oh yes it does. Lots of harm. How about when homeopaths prescribe sugar pills in place of malaria immunisations? Or when a homeopath kills his own child?

Maybe scientists just aren’t advanced enough to understand it yet.

Or maybe they understand it perfectly well, and it’s bollocks.

So what happened to the hundreds of sceptics who took an overdose of homeopathic medicine? Nothing. None fell asleep and none died. Some, however, admitted to enjoying the sugar rush and at least one has twittered that she’s been fancying a sweet or two ever since.