I have no interest in homeopathy and other forms of alternative medicine. If people believe jars of water or inert oily stuff lessens the symptoms of their illness, good for them. Whatever works for you. As far as I understand it, alternative medicine works by the placebo effect, a well-established scientific phenomenon for which bags of evidence exists.

The Guardian, in a bit of ill-conceived comment-whorage, decided to have a Q&A with London-based yoghurt-weaving herbalists Neil's Yard. NY were perhaps a little daft to agree to it, but they presumably thought that at least some of the questions would be about their commitment to recycling, ethical sourcing, etc. Instead, a smugswarm of Badscience-reader types descended immediately, decrying the herbal healers by posting staggering insights along the lines of 'homeopathic remedies aren't much use in cases of blunt trauma'. Take that, apothecary! Up the Enlightenment! After scrolling down the first page of comments, I actually found myself siding with Neil's Yard.

In the same way that the Dawkins-fanboys are "culturally Christian" C of E atheists with no desire to create a genuinely godless system of morality, motivated solely by the prospect of point-scoring online and sticking it to some beardies, the Ben Goldacre dittoheads are generally scientifically illiterate smartarses motivated solely by the prospect of point-scoring online and sticking it to some beardies. While I've no time for crystal healing fetishists or 'smell to get well' types, there's nothing more likely to earn them my sympathy than reams of self-congratulatory high-fiving from uppity little berks who bang on about "control groups", "empirical evidence" and "peer review" despite having never so much as seen a scientific paper in their life, much less read one.

Just as the Dawkinsians ignore the damage done by the universally-believed (but non-theist) religion of "the free market", preferring the easy target of God-botherers, the Science Nerds have little to say about the dodgy stuff done by Big Pharma (pathologising ordinary human behaviour for profit, or manipulating the results of those precious peer-reviewed studies), preferring the easy target of essential oil hawkers. There's nothing so depressing as seeing people imagining they're speaking truth to power as they nobly stand up for the establishment against the totalitarian tyranny of... a few harmless loons.

Maybe I have a natural tendency to side with the underdog, or I'm just a born contrarian, but - bloody hell. The first page of comments included Mr Logic-esque gems like "sounds like classic regression to the mean" (italics in original) and "ah, the post hoc ergo propter hoc argument from anecdote." Can you imagine someone coming out with noxious I-think-you'll-find-ery like that in the pub? I'd want to slam a fire door shut on their head repeatedly.

I'm reminded of the time The Lancet published a study by Johns Hopkins University (peer reviewed and all the rest of it), estimating the casualties produced by the invasion of Iraq at 650000, ten times what the ultra-conservative figures produced by the likes of Iraq Body Count were giving at that point. Supporters of the war, faced with having to defend civilian deaths an order of magnitude higher than they'd previously thought, suddenly became experts on epidemiology, and bawbags who'd always imagined those Tefal adverts were an accurate portrayal of scientists were suddenly crowing about "flawed methodology" and "main street bias". The shitstorm in a test tube culminated in the invention of the phrase "rhetorical inflation" and the assertion that The Lancet was an agent of Islamofascism.

In other words, the rule seems to be - science is great when you can use it to piss hippies off, but it's totally rubbish when it discovers we killed loads of brown people.