Georgina - No bloody idea - give me a chance I have 4 more years of learning to go (Though I will ask my tutor for you)
bundle - why are randomised double blind trials - an evaluation method invented for conventional medicine in the relativly recent past- the only measure of scientificity (if that's a word)? They are brilliant for circumstances where you need to know whether a particular drug has the action you expect, but they don't work for homeopathy because homeopathy doesn't pretend that a remedy will work for an illness. We don't try to kill bacteria, or reduce blood pressure levels, or chelate bile acids with a remedy, we just use them to encourage the body to do what it is meant to do.
In very early examples, homeoapthy was used very succesfully to treat epidemics of scarlet fever and cholera and had a success rate (ie, patient didn't die)of over 95%. Crucially, each patient was not prescibed the same remedy, but one of a range that produced similar symptoms depending on how each individual presented. Obviously nowadays we'd just take the correct antibiotic, because modern medicine has evolved some very effective direct treatments, but there are still many other diseases where we cannot "fix" the problem with a magic bullet type of drug.
A proper evaluation would be for a homeopath to go through patients consultations and prescribe as normal, but have randomised patients handed either a placebo or the prescribedremedy in double blind - however I doubt many homeopaths would be willing ot take part - they already know their methods work, so why put patients health at risk to convince unconvincible cynics?
And you say an "enhanced" placebo effect - what else but teh remdy can be providing that enhancement?