Earlier today, Minister for Health Services Mike O'Brien, the Department of Health's Chief Scientist David Harper, and Kent Woods, Chief Executive of the MHRA were questioned by MPs as part of the Science and Technology Select Committee's "Evidence Check" on homeopathy. The Committee's previous hearing had been amusing, as homeopaths failed to make a clear case for their potions and a representative of Boots admitted knowingly selling unproven pills to customers. But even in comparison to that, today's second and final hearing was a car crash.

Phil Willis MP, the chair of the committee, began by clarifying the purpose of the evidence check. It was not, he said, a hearing to determine the evidence for homeopathy; but rather a hearing to determine the extent of the evidence supporting government policy on homeopathy. This raises the question, what exactly is the government's policy on homeopathy? Bear that question in mind as we go through the hearing.

Things began to go downhill at around the time Chief Minister O'Brien began speaking, in response to Willis asking him whether there was any evidence for homeopathy beyond the placebo effect. "Certainly there's the placebo effect", O'Brien rambled, before referring to a trial in Northern Ireland which tested various alternative medicines "not including homeopathy." After a gentle request from Willis to "stick to homeopathy", he accepted "No."

As Ben Goldacre put it on Twitter: "omfg Mike O’Brien MP from DH trying to quote bonkers NI document on CAM, then folds." Quite.

If O'Brien was reluctant, Professor Harper looked like Ian Willis had asked him to punch his mother. "This is clearly a very challenging area with mixed views from the scientific community," he waffled aimlessly, and with a definition of 'community' looser than Melanie Phillips' grip on reality, before concluding that the majority of independent scientists felt the evidence was "weak, or absent." Next it was Kent Wood's turn, and we had yet more waffle about "ambiguous" evidence before finally he too put the point that there was no evidence for an effect beyond the placebo effect.

Two things immediately stood out from this exchange. They all said 'no', but they all took a long time saying it, and this reluctance to answer clear questions set the tone for the rest of the session.

But Wood wasn't finished there as, unprompted, he employed a variation of the "Bennett Defense" that worked jjust so damned well for Boots last week. 10% of the population have used these pills, he argued, so who are we to contradict them?

"Right, so if significant people believed in withcraft, we would seriously consider that?" replied Willis, with a nano-smirk flickering across his features. It was telling that, in comparison to the independent nature of witness in the first hearing, Wood deferred to his Chief, O'Brien. This was very much a question of a minister and his minions. O'Brien began by dismissing what he clearly felt was a silly question, but then wittered along the same track: there is "no evidence, but a body of people who believe in it."

Right, so, er, if people believed in withcraft, would...? Never mind. What was made abundantly clear was that O'Brien did not require evidence for homeopathy to work, in order to have a policy on it. What the flying duck that policy was, wasn't yet clear, but it was not evidence based, and O'Brien was prepared to concede this on record.

But it got weirder. As Evan Harris began to talk about the placebo effect as a justification for policies, Minister O'Brien interrupted him:

"We don't need to [justify policy], what we need to do is the opposite, we would need to justify stopping the funding now."

Wait, what?!

So at this point the Minister had given three justifications for government policy: i) some people believe in homeopathy; ii) homeopathy has a placebo effect; iii) we're already funding it. I say 'justifications', but of course I mean moronically vague and useless points. Again, if those are your criteria, why not turn to astrology or witchcraft on the NHS?

Harris pressed on, and O'Brien went off on a surreal tangent about medical efforts, saying that it would be ethical for doctors to prescribe placebos "as long as they believed in the treatments." When pressed further, he finally stated the government's position: "this is a controversial area of 'medicine' [his quotes], and it should be a matter for clinicians."

Evan harried: "Would you as a patient be happy, to be given something that didn't work, but be told it worked, in the hope that it would make you better. So paternalistic deception?"

No, he replied, and nor would most patients. So it would be ethical for a doctor to prescribe a placebo, but the patients wouldn't like it. But it's still ethical, as long as you believe what you're doing is right. On and on he twisted and turned: it's ethical, it's deceptive, it's ethical but only in trial conditions; O'Brien moved through more positions than the Kama Sutra. "Let's move away from homeopathy for a moment," he suggested. Good plan mate, it's not your strongest subject.

We then moved on to the justification of the research. "There is a strong medical lobby in favour of homeopathy," O'Brien admitted (the FOI request is in the post), before waffling on about the need to research things that aren't clear. Not for the first time, Harris had to repeat himself, pointing out that many trials had been done, and the evidence was overwhelmingly negative. "On that basis," Britain's best MP asked, "can you justify spending any more taxpayers' money on researching a question [that is settled]?"

And back the answer came. Some people believe it, it has a placebo effect and therefore it's worth spending money on said O'Brien as the eyebrows of Evan Harris made an escape bid for the ceiling. He turned to Harper hoping for sanity, but instead got the garbled message that in "conventional scientific thinking" there is a "lack of plausibility," with the suggestion that more basic research (rather than RCTs) might be necessary. This is the Department of Health's Chief Scientist, remember.

So, witchcraft on the NHS then?

The government's policy (or lack of) was gradually coming into focus, and Willis tried valiently to get further clarity from three people who looked about as conformtable with the question as Guy Goma. Several people commented on Twitter that they appeared to view their role as 'defending homeopathy', but in fact they were defending government policy on homeopathy. This had the side effect of rendering Harper, as the DoH Chief Scientist, completely redundant to the proceedings once it had been established that government policy on these medicines, uniquely, had nothing to do with efficacy.

Earlier, Minister O'Brien had suggested that it was up to clinicians to decide whether or not they could ethically prescribe placebos like homeopathy. Given that the head of an NHS trust had given evidence last week stating that prescribing placebos had suggested that placebos were unethical, wouldn't this mean having different policies in different parts of the NHS? "Yes", said the Minister, confirming - staggeringly - that the NHS's policy on homeopathy could come down to basically "whatever your GP says."

Next up came the MHRA, and I'll continue with them in the second part of this post, later today. In the meantime, let's just summarize. We learned, spectacularly, that the government has no coherent policy on homeopathy, and if it did have one it wouldn't require evidence of efficacy to support it; that as long as some people believe in something it is appopriate to divert public money to it, and that once you have done so you no longer have to justify that spending.

And if you think that's bad, wait until you see what the MHRA had to say.