Trick or Treatment - Reception

Reception

The book received generally good reviews. The New England Journal of Medicine's review said this about the authors: "Simon Singh is a physicist and science journalist, and his coauthor, Edzard Ernst, is a physician and professor of complementary medicine. Ernst is one of the best qualified people to summarize the evidence on this topic." The Daily Telegraph found the book to be "a clearly written, scrupulously scientific examination of the health claims of key areas of alternative medicine: acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic therapy and herbal medicine. The results are stark. In no case, apart from in some limited ways in herbal medicine, do any of these 'therapies’ work. On the contrary, they can be life-threatening." The journal Nature tempered a generally positive review with a concern that the authors' sense of certainty "mirrors that of the proponents of alternative therapies, leaving each position as entrenched as ever."

Trick or Treatment drew criticism from consumers and practitioners of alternative therapies. The British Journal of General Practice published a review by Jeremy Swayne (former dean of the Faculty of Homeopathy) that was critical of the book and its argument.

A review by Harriet A. Hall on Quackwatch stated that some negative reviews of Trick or Treatment demonstrated "an appalling poverty of thought"; articulating that since the reasoning behind the author's conclusions is solid, critics instead deny the methods of science, misrepresent the book's contents and use ad hominem attacks against the authors.