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understand science properly. I would also be the first to agree that people don’t buy expensive cosmetics simply because they have a belief in their efficacy, because it’s “a bit more complicated than that”: these are luxury goods, status items, and they are bought for all kinds of interesting reasons.
    But it’s not entirely morally neutral. First, the manufacturers of these products sell shortcuts to smokers and the obese; they sell the idea that a healthy body can be attained by using expensive potions, rather than by simple old-fashioned exercise and eating your greens. This is a recurring theme throughout the world of bad science.
    More than that, these ads sell a dubious worldview. They sell the idea that science is not about the delicate relationship between evidence and theory. They suggest, instead, with all the might of their international advertising budgets, their Microcellular Complexes, their Neutrilium XY, their Tenseur Peptidique Végétal, and the rest, that science is about impenetrable nonsense involving equations, molecules, sciencey diagrams, sweeping didactic statements from authority figures in white coats, and that this sciencey-sounding stuff might just as well be made up, concocted, confabulated out of thin air, in order to make money. They sell the idea that science is incomprehensible, with all their might, and they sell this idea mainly to attractive young women, who are disappointingly underrepresented in the sciences.
    In fact, they sell the worldview of Teen Talk Barbie from Mattel, who shipped with a sweet little voice circuit inside her so she could say things like “Math class is tough!,” “I love shopping!,” and “Will we ever have enough clothes?” when you pressed her buttons. In December 1992 the feminist direct-action Barbie Liberation Organization switched the voice circuits of hundreds of Teen Talk Barbies and G.I. Joe dolls in American stores. On Christmas Day Barbie said, “Dead men tell no lies,” in a nice assertive voice, and the boys got soldiers under the tree telling them, “Math class is tough!” and asking, “Wanna go shopping?”
    The work of the BLO is not yet done.

Homeopathy
     
    And now for the meat. But before we take a single step into this arena, we should be clear on one thing: despite what you might think, I’m not desperately interested in complementary and alternative medicine (a dubious piece of phraseological rebranding in itself). I am interested in the role of medicine, our beliefs about the body and healing, and I am fascinated—in my day job—by the intricacies of how we can gather evidence for the benefits and risks of a given intervention.
    Homeopathy, in all of this, is simply our tool.
    So here we address one of the most important issues in science: How do we know if an intervention works? Whether it’s a face cream, a detox regime, a school exercise, a vitamin pill, a parenting program, or a heart attack drug, the skills involved in testing an intervention are all the same. Homeopathy makes the clearest teaching device for evidence-based medicine for one simple reason: homeopaths give out little sugar pills, and pills are the easiest thing in the world to study.
    By the end of this section you will know more about evidence-based medicine and trial design than the average doctor. You will understand how trials can go wrong and give false positive results, how the placebo effect works, and why we tend to overestimate the efficacy of pills. More important, you will also see how a health myth can be created, fostered, and maintained by the alternative medicine industry, using all the same tricks on you, the public, that big pharma uses on doctors. This is about something much bigger than homeopathy.
    What is Homeopathy?
     
    Homeopathy is perhaps the paradigmatic example of an alternative therapy. It claims the authority of a rich historical heritage, but its history is routinely rewritten for the PR needs of a contemporary