I normally hate to be critical of specific charities, but I’m going to make an exception because I’ve just found one of the worst charities in the world.

Homeopaths Without Borders (HWB) has provided homeopathic care and education in Guatemala, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Sri Lanka. Since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, it has focused efforts there, too. Besides minor ailments, HWB also treats malaria, typhoid, cholera, dengue fever, advanced diabetes, and educates about the “beneficial effects” of these treatments.

Laugh or cry? I can’t decide. There’s something really wrong with a company that deludes the barely educated global poor with the false hope of a malaria treatment–when they could have been seeking assistance that might actually save their life. It’s even more wrong that it can get the tax exemption status known as 501(c)3 in the US.

I have nothing against the people behind the organization; they likely have the noble intention of doing their best to alleviate suffering in the developing world. But here are the facts: Five independent meta-analyses by the Cochrane Collaboration, which gives impartial and independent summaries and analyses of relevant scientific literature, found no evidence that homeopathy outperforms placebo. In 2005, a meta-analysis by the Lancet of 110 studies of homeopathy and 110 studies of matched conventional medicine found no evidence that homeopathic medicine outperformed placebo. And the US government’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine says:

There is little evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment for any specific condition…. Several key concepts of homeopathy are inconsistent with fundamental concepts of chemistry and physics.

I contacted Homeopaths Without Borders for comment. The organization referred me to research and information provided by the non-independent and non-governmentally affiliated National Center For Homeopathy, and three studies that point to success better than that of placebo. Indeed, some studies suggest, with probability of less than 5%, that homeopathy outperforms placebo. The trouble is that, if you do enough studies, then simply through chance you’ll get some apparently positive results (an idea beautifully illustrated by Randall Munroe). That’s why we need to rely on analyses like the Cochrane Collaboration, rather than just some artificially selected corner of proof.

In its reply, HWB said “there is no better proof of its effectiveness than to see it ‘on the ground.’” But anecdotal “on the ground” evidence is problematic precisely because you don’t know whether people treated got better because of the treatment, or whether through placebo, or whether they just would have gotten better anyway, as many people do. Again, I don’t have much problem with people dishing out placebos if they make people’s lives better. But when those people might then not seek other treatment that is efficacious beyond placebo, that’s problematic.

Still, there’s some good to be gleaned from HWB. Mainly, the way we think about charity in general is all wrong, and HWB’s tax status is simply the most extreme end of a wider problem. If you’ve got a standard for assessing charity effectiveness where somehow HWB could carry out its homeopathy program and be a top-rated charity, then your metric is a non-starter. Unfortunately, this applies to almost all professional charity evaluators. Let’s look at some common standards:

1. Overhead Ratio

This one is pretty famous: the idea is that you look at how much a charity spends on overhead (such as fundraising and administration) and how much the charity spends on “program costs”—the actual activity that the charity is aiming to implement. According to this metric, the lower the ratio of overheads to program costs, the better the charity. The American Institute of Philanthropy relies pretty heavily on this metric; Charity Navigator, which evaluates and rates philanthropic endeavors, uses it as one input among others.

But let’s suppose that HWB had almost no overhead. All the employees are so enthusiastic about their mission that they volunteer, and they have enough supporters that they don’t need to spend money on fundraising—so overheads are tiny. Does this make the charity good? No. As long as it’s still distributing pseudo-medicine, it isn’t a good charity, because there’s no benefit to people. In fact, if they spent on “overhead” like research maybe they’d discover the scientific evidence in opposition to their mission and go do something else instead.