Welcome to the first in a series of articles with the potential to make an entire industry look a little bit less credible. No, not the media - I'm referring to the woolly world of "alternative medicine", and specifically to the branch concerned with passing off posies as penicillin, and flogging flavoured water as a miracle cure.
Just in case you haven't read the headline correctly, this is not a blow-by-blow account of icky hand-brushes with other men, or my struggles to avoid eye contact at the urinal. You're reading Diary of a homeophobe, featuring the travels of a hardened doubter through the unicorn-infested magic forest of pseudoscience. For the next six months, I'm handing myself over to the quacks for the treatment of a chronic medical condition.
Homeopathy, for those that don't know, is a holistic system of healing involving the application of substances thought to exacerbate the symptoms of an illness. In tiny, tiny quantities. A typical "dose" is a solution so dilute it may not even contain a single molecule of the "cure". Instead, as the Society of Homeopaths explains, a shaking process called succussion "imprints the healing energy of the medicinal substance throughout the body of water", paradoxically increasing the strength of the remedy with each round of dilution. The efficacy of the method, needless to say, is unsupported by modern scientific research.
It's easy to make fun of homeopathy. No, it really is easy. And in many ways, mockery feels like a healthy way to begin this experiment. Homeopaths strenuously deny that the remedies rely on psychosomatic healing triggers; critics point to the exploitation of medical idiom as evidence that psychological persuasion is in fact crucial.
This is where I come in. As a gritted-teeth realist, spiritual as an abandoned shoe, I like to think that I'll be more resistant than most to the unsubstantiated claims and vague rhetoric of this alternative method. I'm just not a homeopathy kind of guy. I've got a sceptical northern mother who swats down any nascent flights of sentiment with the rolled-up baby photo she uses as a coaster. And despite a brief flirtation with Geri Halliwell's yoga DVD in 2005, I tend to treat all faddish lifestyle choices with the same polite, glassy-eyed condescension.
Cursory research tells me that many Guardian readers feel the same. When Covent Garden petal-pushers Neal's Yard Remedies opened themselves up to public scrutiny on the Ethical living blog, you guys did what you do best and shouted at them until they went away. My favourite comments from the thread are: 'It enrages me that quacks prey on human anxieties like this' and 'She turned me into a newt!'
Well, let's see if you're right.
A bit about my condition: I have semi-severe atopic eczema all over my body. Face, head, neck, trunk, limbs, hands, feet ... For the last fifteen years it has been treated, with diminishing success, via twice-daily applications of steroid cream. However, since prolonged and widespread steroid treatment carries the risk of serious side effects, including hyperglycaemia, skin thinning, susceptibility to infection, glaucoma, laziness, underachievement and immaturity (maybe), I need to come off the stuff.
Beneath this bravado, I am genuinely looking for an alternative method of controlling a rapidly deteriorating illness. If homeopathy does work, you'll soon see me on a street corner near you, off my face on echinacea and slurring peacefully about the limitations of science. If it doesn't, you'll hear me saying something else - right on this very blog, in fact.
In the week since my first consultation, little has changed. In fact, the whole thing was anticlimactically similar to a regular hospital visit. I was ushered into a treatment room, where a charming older doctor - a convert from standard medicine - half-heartedly wheeled out the old metaphor about my skin needing reinforcement, like an army, and then prescribed me an oral course of evening primrose oil capsules (to relieve dry skin) and homeopathic sulphur, to a dilution of 6C (10-12).
I haven't, so far, been told to down steroids and throw myself headlong into a bath of algae. Instead, I've been instructed to come back in two months (an improvement on the dermatologist, who summoned me every five) to discuss my progress. The doctor did say that my condition is "obviously stress-related", an observation my dermatologist never made. But progress so far has been non-existent, which proves nothing either way. She warned me that this thing takes time.
While I wait to improve or deteriorate - or, most likely, remain crushingly the same - I'd like you to think of me as your ambassador to the world of the flower people. I'm open to questions, compliments, abuse and suggestions on the thread below. However, before you mention the cost of treatment, I should say that I'm not paying for any of this, and so I'm not being exploited. It's on the NHS, so technically you are.
• Peter will be blogging about his treatment monthly, on the first Wednesday of each month
