The Pharmacy Guild of Australia says it's up to individual pharmacists to decide if they'll stop selling homeopathic remedies branded useless by doctors.
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has formally recommended that GPs stop prescribing homeopathic remedies, and says pharmacists should consider stripping their shelves of such products because there's no evidence they work.
But the Australian Homeopathic Association says the recommendation is based on a flawed finding which did not take into account all evidence about the efficacy of homeopathic treatments.
The RACGP's position statement on homeopathy, released on Wednesday, follows recent findings by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) that homeopathy produces no health benefits over and above that of a placebo.
The pharmacy guild says it's not a regulatory authority, and as such there'll be no recommendation backing RACGP's call for such products to be taken off the market.
It says its advice to pharmacists is to ensure customers have access to objective, informed advice about complementary medicines.
"Pharmacists, as health professionals, have a duty of care to be aware of available clinical evidence that supports the therapeutic and marketing claims made about all products sold in their pharmacies," the guild said in a statement.
However, Australian Homeopathic Association president Martin Costigan said the RACGP had simply repeated verbatim a finding by the NHMRC, which his association maintains is biased and excludes all available evidence.
"It's completely false to say on the best available evidence there's no reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective when you've only taken into account a very small amount of the evidence available and specifically excluded evidence that would actually support that there is efficacy for homeopathy," Mr Costigan said.
He also rejected claims from RACGP president Dr Frank Jones that homeopathic products could cause people to delay seeking proper medical care, or lead them to reject conventional medical approaches entirely.
"Evidence that homeopathy works is nil," Dr Jones told AAP.
"Some of my own patients take alternative medicines and I respect that's their choice. But they should know some of these therapies out there are not scientifically based."
The NHMRC stood by its review, saying it was based on a thorough, scientific examination of 1800 studies on the health effects of homeopathy.
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