The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knocked the stuffing out of homeopathic drug company Terra-Medica last week, when the regulatory agency announced that a number of its "natural" remedies contained actual drugs.

Moreover, Wired UK points out that homeopathy is based on the idea that medicinal products should only be present at extremely low or undetectable levels because these concentrations can prompt the body to "heal itself." This is largely how homeopathic products manage to evade most of the FDA's oversight because, in theory, these drugs don't contain active ingredients (the FDA currently checks the drugs for ingredient purity and packaging accuracy, not effectiveness).

This sort of recall doesn't bode well for homeopathy as a whole. If the FDA starts to find that some companies are including active ingredients in their formulas, it might have to look at the remedies more closely. Doing so would be tough for both the FDA and the companies, because checking a drug's effectiveness usually means comparing it to its competitors, as well as placebos. And, according to a 2010 report from the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, homeopathic drugs are about as effective as sugar pills.