MONTREAL - Former NDP leader Tom Mulcair's work for a pro-homeopathy advocacy group is raising eyebrows among critics who denounce the field as pseudoscience.
Mulcair told a conference in Montreal Tuesday that he's been using homeopathic remedies for about 30 years and feels the Quebec government should do more to recognize and regulate the field.
"With regard to homeopathy it has been proven time and again, and never contradicted that homeopathic medicines cannot cause direct harm," he said.
His presence was discouraging to Jonathan Jarry of the McGill Office for Science and Society, who says there's no scientific evidence to show homeopathic remedies work for any health condition.
"The best studies that we have show that there is nothing to homeopathy, it's based on prescientific beliefs having to do with sympathetic magic," he said. "I mean you might as well give a professional order to astrologers and to psychics while you're at it."
Homeopathy is based on the principle that "like cures like " -- a belief that a disease can be cured by ingesting a small dose of something that produces similar symptoms in a healthy person.
Proponents of homeopathy also believe that a product becomes more potent the more it is diluted -- a principle that Jarry says flies in the face of basic scientific principles.
Mulcair, billed as a "patron" of the conference, acknowledges homeopathic products are controversial but believes government has a responsibility to ensure homeopaths are well-trained and patients have access to the treatments they feel work for them.
- With files from CTV News Montreal
