Trick or Treatment?: alternative medicine on trial - Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst

This is a comprehensive but rather dry overview of the published literature on alternative therapies, focussing particularly on acupuncture, homeopathy and herbalism. Their performance is predictable. As the old joke has it, there is a word for alternative medicine that has been shown to work; medicine.

I would suggest Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science to somebody interested in issues such as scientific methodology or the placebo effect, but this is a handy reference book for debunking specific woo-woo therapies.