Persephone, have you ever read up on the actual articles cited by the book you're quoting from? Here's what little tidbits I have from scanning the article.

J. Kleijinen, P. Knipschild, and Gerben ter Riet. "Clinical Trials of Homeopathy." British Medical Journal 302 (Feb 9, 1991): 316-323

"CONCLUSIONS--At the moment the evidence of clinical trials is positive but not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias. This indicates that there is a legitimate case for further evaluation of homoeopathy, but only by means of well performed trials."

Note also that the conclusion and analysis portion of the paper recommended publication bias as a serious concern for the legitimacy of a meta-analysis.

J.P. Zmirou, D. D'Adhemar, D. and F. Balducci. "A Controlled Evaluation of a Homeopathic Preparation in the Treatment of Influenza-like Syndromes." British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 299 (1989): 365-366

"Despite the use of terms such as "attributable fraction" which have specific meaning in clinical epidemiology parlance, it would be unwise to claim that the study has demonstrated a cause and effect relationship between the drug and the recoveries.""

What's also good to note is that the "difference in efficacy" for the control and variable group for recovery time was about 7%, while upwards of 12% of patients who were supposed to submit post-sickness data failed to. Also, note that the p-values compared were those typical for a clinical trial, although this had none of the legitimacy of such a trial, due largely to the fact that patients were treated for flu-like symptoms but were not even checked to see if they had the actual disease, as well as the fact that all data measurements were taken by the patients themselves, rather than physicians.

"Quadruple Blind." Lancet (April 4, 1989): 91

What's funny is that, due in no small part to this article, the Lancet has refused to lend editorial support to the article past its publishing and has recently dismissed even the possibility of homeopathy as a legitimate form of treatment.

I will also note that proving the efficacy, or lack thereof, of homeopathy has nothing to do with antibiotics being overused, nor does it have anything to do with calling into question fellow sifters' "life experiences" nor one's own experiences, which are anecdotal and biased in nature and thus not viable as factual evidence in an overall scientific analysis.