Professor Edzard Ernst is the first Professor of Complementary Medicine in the United Kingdom, yet he is not some woo merchant, instead he has for years investigated and tested various alternative medicines.

Well now Professor Edzard Ernst is putting up £10,000 to be given to the first person who can show homeopathy is better than a placebo in a scientifically controlled trial.

By Jon Donni

Professor Edzard Ernst has told advocates of homeopathy and the practisioners to finally 'put up or shut up', and stated that there was still no strong evidence that homoepthay was effective in any way more than a simple placebo.

In 2008, Professor Edzard Ernst and Dr.Simon Singh published "Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial"

It was revealed by Professor Edzard Ernst that Britain spends £500 million a year on unproved or disproved therapies.

More recently Professor Edzard Ernst and Dr.Simon Singh wrote a letter to The Times where they called on Prince Charles to recall various publications that they claimed misrepresented scientific evidence about therapies like homeopathy, one of the publications was actually produced with a £900,000 grant from The Department of Health.

So now with Professor Edzard Ernst £10,000 challenge you would expect that the Homeopaths would be queing up to prove at last in a proper scientific study that their claims were true, instead however the homeopaths have attacked Ernst claiming his challenge is no more than a publicity stunt. Well what better way to prove that than to call his bluff surely?

Instead the homeopaths are trotting out the usual believer lines of "we already have our proof" and "we don't need to prove something we already know works"

It seems to me that the homeopaths are once again running scared.

Dr Simon Singh claimed in the Daily Mail:
'If homeopathy could be proven to be effective it might earn the researcher a Nobel Prize in Medicine,'

'He or she would also deserve Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics because the laws of science would need to be re-written.'

But it seems that homeopaths have little to no interest in truly proving their claims, however if someone did decide to take up Professor Edzard Ernst on his challenge all they would need to do is publish their evidence through the "Cochrane Collaboration", which is a respected independent group within the UK which investigates medicines and various claims.

Somehow I don't think anyone will be taking Ernst up on his challenge, but then again you never know.