The government has released its eagerly anticipated response to the Science and Technology Committee's Evidence Check on Homeopathy and, incredibly, it's even worse than I thought it would be. The verdict is "business as usual", with the main recommendations of the committee ignored in a fog of confusion and double-think.

You get a sense of this confusion very early on, with lines like: "given the geographical, socioeconomic and cultural diversity in England, [policy on homeopathy] involves a whole range of considerations including, but not limited to, efficacy." I actually have no idea what this means – do medicines work differently in Norfolk from the way they work in Hampshire? The report doesn't elaborate.

As expected, the word "choice" features heavily in the government's response:

There naturally will be an assumption that if the NHS is offering homeopathic treatments then they will be efficacious, whereas the overriding reason for NHS provision is that homeopathy is available to provide patient choice ... if regulation was applied to homeopathic medicines as understood in the context of conventional pharmaceutical medicines, these products would have to be withdrawn from the market as medicines. This would constrain consumer choice and, more importantly, risk the introduction of unregulated, poor quality and potentially unsafe products on the market to satisfy consumer demand."

So we can't regulate these products as medicines because they'd end up being banned, but we'll let them be called medicines anyway? It gives me a headache just trying to think down to the level of the person who wrote this stuff.

The report accepts that there's no evidence that homeopathy works, but apparently this shouldn't be a barrier to it being distributed via the NHS because not handing out medicines that don't work might infringe the freedom of patients to choose things that don't work. What makes this even more absurd is that they concede that:

In order for the public to make informed choices, it is therefore vitally important that the scientific evidence base for homeopathy is clearly explained and available. He [the government's chief scientific adviser] will therefore engage further with the Department of Health to ensure communication to the public is addressed."

So the government is planning to launch a public information campaign against homeopathic treatments at the same time as it continues to fund those treatments through the NHS. In this glorious mess of a policy the government has come up with something so brain-meltingly stupid that even the satirical brain of Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It, In the Loop) would struggle to match it.

What I find so frustrating is this dedication to a form of "consumer choice" that is absolutely anything but. If I walk into a pharmacist looking for a packet of condoms, and I'm given the choice between a packet of Durex and a sock, it isn't a choice, it's just a pointless piece of confusion that's going to lead to lots of people having really uncomfortable sex, and a localised population explosion.

Another feature worth picking up on is the way in which responsibility for these decisions has been passed down the line, allowing alternative medicine to fall conveniently into various regulatory gaps. The government doesn't believe that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has time to waste on a review of homeopathy, while the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has made its guidelines flexible enough to allow many homeopathic products a free pass, for reasons that are still unfathomable to me.

In this regulatory vacuum the government's response repeatedly delegates responsibility for making decisions on the use of homeopathy to primary care trusts, yet these are set to be abolished in the next few years, which will dump responsibility onto individual GPs.

The General Medical Council's guidance to GPs on the issue of alternative medicine is woolly at best (and the the council has ignored my requests to clarify it). The GMC states that "we are not in a position to advise doctors about the suitability or otherwise of particular treatments as our remit does not extend to collecting, analysing or disseminating clinical information" and basically leaves it to GPs' own judgement about whether or not a treatment is in the best interests of a patient.

Given that some GPs are practising homeopaths, this is a not a thrilling prospect.

Before the election I put questions on science policy to all the main parties on behalf of the Guardian. The Conservatives told me that it would be "wholly irresponsible to spend public money on treatments that have no evidence to support their claims". The Liberal Democrats stated that they would actively seek a full review of complementary and alternative therapies and that, "[if] Nice's advice was that the treatment did not perform better than placebo, then of course it should not be supported by the NHS."

Both parties made a commitment to evidence-based medicine on the NHS. Both parties have performed screeching U-turns on the subject at the first hurdle, ignoring pledges made in writing only three months ago.

What should they do now? As a near namesake of mine once said, I'd make a suggestion, but they wouldn't listen. No one ever does. It's all very depressing.