On Saturday night, perhaps for the first time in history, there was a round of applause at the announcement of a hospital closure. I was speaking at a seminar organised by Skeptics in the Pub, and I had just explained that the Tunbridge Wells Homoeopathic Hospital is due to close next year because of a huge drop in the number of referrals.

Nobody in the audience was belittling the suffering of those patients who would be deprived of homoeopathic treatment, but instead they were endorsing the fact that the money saved would be spent on more effective treatments.

It was good to be back among friendly sceptics after a week of attacks from homoeopaths. I have just co-written a book that assesses the safety and efficacy of dozens of alternative therapies - our book concludes that a few therapies can indeed help patients, but homoeopathy is not one of them, because there is no real evidence to suggest that it acts as anything except a placebo. There have been more than 200 trials investigating homoeopathy and the overall result is that its remedies are utterly bogus.

There is no reason why homoeopathy should work. According to homoeopaths “like cures like”, so pollen supposedly can cure hay fever. In order to transform it into a cure, the pollen is diluted over and over again until there is nothing left of the original pollen. The resulting solution is then used to create a pill, which therefore contains no active ingredient whatsoever. Homoeopaths readily admit that this is the case, because they claim that it is the “memory” of the pollen that cures patients.

Homoeopathy for colds or bruises is relatively harmless, because all that happens is that you recover after just seven days instead of taking a whole week. The problem, however, is that many homoeopaths will claim to be able to treat everything from malaria to HIV. If you still harbour any sympathies that homoeopathy is a form of medicine that can treat such serious conditions, then perhaps the absurdity of homoeopathy will become apparent if you think about one of its treatments, namely a flu remedy called Oscillococcinum.

Each year a homoeopathic company called Boiron kills a muscovy duck and then extracts its heart and liver. This is then repeatedly diluted to create the entire world's supply of the flu remedy that generates sales of more than $20 million. There is no reason why a duck's heart and liver should cure flu, particularly when it is so diluted that the resulting pills contain no extract of duck. This has to be the ultimate quack remedy.

Simon Singh is the co-author of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial

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