Leading medical journal The Lancet has rubbished homeopathy and says it is no more value than dummy drugs.
The journal is also calling for a halt to more studies and is advising doctors to be bold and honest with patients about homeopathy's "lack of benefit".
A review by Swiss and UK researchers of 110 trials has found no convincing evidence the treatments worked any better than a placebo.
However advocates of homeopathy dispute this and maintain the therapies, which work on the principle of treating like with like, do work.
The row over homeopathy has gone on for years, and many previous studies have demonstrated that homeopathy has an effect over and above placebos.
Apparently someone suffering from an allergy, for example, would use homeopathic medicines in an attempt to beat it with a highly diluted dose of an agent that would cause the same symptoms.
American illusionist James Randi in 2002 offered $1m to anyone able to prove, under observed conditions in a laboratory, that homeopathic remedies can really cure people; as yet, no-one has passed the preliminary tests.
In the UK, homeopathy is available on the National Health Service and some argue for it to be more widely available, while others believe it should not be offered at all.
In it's report on complementary and alternative medicine in 2000, the <<>>, declared that "any therapy that makes specific claims for being able to treat specific conditions should have evidence of being able to do this above and beyond the placebo effect".
According to Professor Matthias Egger, from the <<>>, and Swiss colleagues from <<>>, along with a UK team at the <<>>, homeopathy has no such evidence.
In their review the team compared 110 trials that looked at the effects of homeopathy versus placebo, with 110 trials of conventional medicines for the same medical disorders or diseases.
Included were trials for the treatment of asthma, allergies and muscular problems, some large and some small.
For both homeopathy and conventional medicines, the smaller trials of lower quality showed more beneficial treatment effects than the larger trials.
However, the researchers found that when they looked at only the larger, high-quality trials, they found no convincing evidence that homeopathy worked any better than placebo.