Ebola victims in one of the hardest-hit parts of Liberia have been treated by homeopaths who are determined to prove that arsenic, rattlesnake venom and the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly can cure Ebola.

The homeopaths arrived in Liberia to use the deadly outbreak to prove their controversial theories and have already spent two weeks in the country with patients in a hospital in Ganta, in the north of the country near to the epicentre of the outbreak.

In letters and messages seen by Mail Online they revealed that the aim of their mission was to prove that homeopathy could treat Ebola.

'The manufacturers of experimental vaccines will then have to change their opinions,' boasted Dr Edouard Broussalian, one of the team of two men and two women working in the remote area.

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Experiment in Homeopathy: A team visited Ganta United Methodist Hospital, Liberia, with the intention of testing controversial treatment methods on Ebola victims

'Homeopathy can help Ebola victims': Dr Ortrud Lindemann, from Germany, and Dr Richard Hiltner, from California, United States, are part of the team who travelled to Ganta, Liberia to treat sufferers

Snake venom treatment: Medical staff and patients walk past a bucket of chlorinated water at Ganta United Methodist Hospital, Liberia, where homeopaths went to try to test their remedies

The mission was organised by the Liga Medicorum Homeopathica Internationalis, an international group dedicated to promoting homeopathy.

A message on its website proclaims the initial visit a success because, it claims, the team's results were so 'impressive' that they were asked to establish a program of homeopathic teaching and treatment at the hospital.

'The mission's broader goal of bringing homeopathy to Liberia is therefore underway, thanks to the four volunteers and their work,' it said.

But their intervention has dismayed critics of the controversial technique, whose practitioners use dilutions of substances in water.

Mike Noyes, the head of humanitarian response at UK charity ActionAid, which has teams who support clinics in Sierra Leone and Liberia, told MailOnline: 'With this crisis, you can't be offering false hope.

'There is no scientific evidence that homeopathy has any impact on dealing with viral disease like Ebola.

'Coming in from the outside with these unproven approaches is damaging to the response and bringing the disease under control.'

Homeopaths claim that the way their remedies are prepared - which includes hitting the container 10 times against a leather and horsehair surface - give them a special potency and that the water molecules remember the presence of the active ingredient. Their opponents dismiss the 'treatments' as mumbo-jumbo and fear that desperately-ill Ebola patients will die as a result of their involvement.

The homeopaths - all medical doctors by training - arrived in Liberia on October 17 and the intervention of a team of international doctors was initially welcomed by the ministry of health, desperate for help in fighting a virus that has already killed more than 5,000 people.

'An ethical duty to help': Dr Edouard Broussalian, from Geneva, Switzerland and Dr Medha Durge, from Mumbai, India, visited Ganta Hospital in Liberia as part of a trip to establish if homeopathy could treat Ebola

Remote Ebola hotspot: People outside Ganta United Methodist Hospital, Liberia trying to persuade staff to release the body of a relative who has died from suspected Ebola. Homeopaths visited the hospital

Testing ground for homeopathic doctors: A bucket of chlorinated water at Ganta United Methodist Hospital, Liberia, where a team of homeopaths has visited to try to test their remedies on Ebola patients

HOW DOES HOMEOPATHY WORK? Homeopathy claims to treat and prevent disease by using greatly diluted forms of herbs and minerals. It is based on the principle that 'like cures like' - that an illness can be treated by substances that produce similar symptoms. For example, homeopaths claim that onions, which make eyes itchy and tearful, can be used to relieve the symptoms of hay fever. But research has shown that the level of the substances offered to patients are so small – or even non-existent – that they cannot have a biological effect. Both the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Commons science and technology committee say the NHS should stop funding homeopathic treatments because of a lack of evidence they work. The BMA has described homeopathy as ‘witchcraft’ and last year the Advertising Standards Authority said homeopaths were putting people's lives at risk by discouraging them from seeking medical treatment. The ASA said an assessment of treatments and claims made by the Society of Homeopaths suggested practitioners were offering false hope and may be causing real harm. The ruling raises serious questions about the value of homeopathy, which has many well-known advocates, including Prince Charles and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. The society's website said evidence existed to show homeopathy can treat a wide range of ailments. But the ASA said several of these – bronchitis, osteoarthritis and vertigo – were conditions for which medical supervision should be sought, rather than relying on homeopathy. Consequently, it said the claims were a breach of its advertising codes. Last month an Australian study concluded that homeopathy was no more effective than placebo. Advertisement

But the homeopaths suffered a setback when health officials discovered that they intended to experiment with homeopathic treatments on Ebola sufferers.

The team was allowed to travel to Ganta United Methodist Hospital, but on strict instructions not to use homeopathic remedies. Whether they followed those instructions is not known because the hospital in Ganta said it did not monitor their activity.

When Mail Online went to the hospital to find the doctors, assistant administrator Patrick Mantor said they had left. 'There were four of them. One left earlier and three of them left last Friday.

'They came first to do some homeopathic treatment but the paper arrangement was not made with the ministry of health. They said another group might come.

'They were seeing people with pains and weakness. I wasn't present when they were doing this so I don't know how they treated them. I don't know anything about homeopathy.

'The process is going on in their absence so that they can come back with the proper paperwork.'

Dr Moses Massaquoi, head of Ebola case management for the Liberian health ministry, confirmed that the homeopaths had gone to Ganta but he said he was unaware that they were homeopaths when they first arrived.

'I didn't know that they were going to do homeopathy,' he said.

He said that the homeopaths had been told that they were not to try to practice homeopathy on Ebola patients, but they were allowed to go to the hospital to help out as physicians.

'They said they wouldn't use any homeopathy,' he said.

But the homeopaths hope that they can overcome the initial setback and press on with their mission, and have applied to return to Liberia.

Dr Broussalian explained their mission - to discover what homeopathic treatment would cure Ebola - on his own website, Planete Homea, in a post he later deleted.

He and his colleagues have made efforts to erase references to their trips after they were seized on by critics, but traces remain on the internet and Mail Online has been able to access much of the original material.

In a post [in French] titled Mission Ebola Dr Broussalian explained how they planned to tackle Ebola:

Epidemic escalates: In Sierra Leone, which neighbours Liberia, Health workers in Freetown carried a corpse out of a house yesterday. Homeopaths have been trying to treat victims of Ebola with snake venom

Dignified burial: Health workers from the Sierra Leone's Red Cross Society Burial Team 7 place a body in a grave at King Tom cemetary in Freetown yesterday

Taking no chances: The burial teams are carefully prepared for the retrieval missions in Sierra Leone, which has seen an increase in Ebola cases compared to neighbouring Liberia

'Using the basic clinical details available to us, I carried out an initial study to allow us to target the group of potential medicines.

'Hydrogenising arsenic the obvious starting point, with serpent venom (the reputation of which in the case of yellow fever or complaints with coagulation problems is no longer useful) with Lachesis and especially Crotalus. In particular we mustn't forget Cantharis which shows a huge number of symptoms of the illness. But we need to be at the bedside of the patients without any foregone conclusions and to listen to what nature tells us.'

Crotalus is rattlesnake venom. Lachesis is the venom of the South American bushmaster snake. Cantharis, obtained from Spanish Fly, can be highly toxic and in sufficient concentration causes urinary and sexual problems. Spanish Fly has long been used as an aphrodisiac.

[Ebola] is a unique opportunity to demonstrate the value of homeopathy... we hope to treat such large numbers that no challenge will be possible Dr Edouard Broussalian

Dr Broussalian, however, is confident that the potions will help Ebola victims: 'Necessity is the mother of invention, we have an ethical duty to help these depleted populations and if all goes as planned to provide them with a strong and more or less cost-free defence against this scourge.

'Backed by experience in the future we will probably be able to take care the European cases if they should occur.

'Finally, it is a unique opportunity to demonstrate the value of homeopathy. Of course they [their critics] will challenge us as to whether the 'cured patients' were really ill in the first place, but we hope to treat such large numbers that no challenge will be possible. The manufacturers of experimental vaccines will then have to change their opinions.'

The four doctors involved in the mission were Dr Richard Hiltner, from California, United States; Dr Edouard Broussalian, from Geneva, Switzerland: Dr Ortrud Lindemann, from Germany, and Dr Medha Durge, from Mumbai, India.

Epidemic spreads: Health workers work at an Ebola treatment center in Bamako, Mali, today, as the government announced tougher health checks at border crossings after registering its second Ebola outbreak

Crackdown: The Mali government has ordered tougher health checks at the border after a second outbreak emerged. Healthworkers (above) at an Ebola treatment center in Bamako, Mali today

They checked into the Wingus Guesthouse in the capital Monrovia and two days after they arrived, Dr Lindemann wrote a letter to supporters updating them on their progress. Her letter can be found on the Facebook pages of some of those supporters.

'On arrival the atmosphere is tense, we get our aprox temperature taken. Warnings about Ebola everywhere!!!,' she wrote.

One piece of their luggage was missing, but she was relieved that it did not include any of the 110 remedies they had brought with them.

'How Could we have dared to go here without our most valuable tools???,' she wrote.

The group was met by a small party including a representative of the ministry of foreign affairs and someone from the health department.

'We finally reached after so many weeks of struggling to be able to travel to what we had decided to do. We are destined to help the people of Liberia to fight Ebola Virus Disease with an effective means of fighting epidemics : homeopathic remedies.'

Their target was the hospital in Ganta where, Dr Lindemann wrote there were only three Liberian doctors working.

Homeopathic remedies: British medical journal The Lancet has attacked the use of homeopathic treatments saying that doctors should be honest about homeopathy's lack of benefit

From gunpowder to snake venom: Homeopathic treatments have come under for not being effective but a team is trying to test them in one of the worst Ebola hotspots in Liberia

She described meeting the board of the hospital who 'were so interested in our mission that we had a hard time leaving after two hours and asked/ pleaded us to not only stay for our intended three weeks.'

The organisers of the mission, the LHMI, say they wrote to the Liberian government in August to offer the services of homeopaths in the treatment of Ebola patients.

It said they received an invitation on October 7 and noted that the World Health Organisation had declared the outbreak an international public health emergency and endorsed the use of experimental, unproven and unregistered interventions.

It said: 'Even if the homeopathic treatment were to be completely ineffective - which we do not expect - it would still be compliant with the WHO rules. Furthermore a homeopathic treatment with high potencies would have no possible side effect and, in the worst case, the mortality would correspond to that of all other treatment centers.'

The mission's goal of bringing homeopathy to Liberia is underway, thanks to the four volunteers and their work International homeopathy group

The LMHI said it was surprised that the team were not allowed to use homeopathy on Ebola patients during this visit, but put that down to 'a few diplomatic problems'.

But it said they had been able to use their skills to treat 'very severe' non-Ebola patients.

'Both hospital and clinic out-patients were seen and treated, with impressive results. The results were so promising that the LMHI were requested on departure to establish a program of homeopathic teaching and treatment in the Hospital. The mission's broader goal of bringing homeopathy to Liberia is therefore underway, thanks to the four volunteers and their work.'

There have been a large number of deaths from Ebola in and around Ganta since the start of the outbreak. Ten people died in the space of just 48 hours in September and the hospital now has a specialised Ebola treatment unit.

According to his own website, Richard Hiltner has been a medical doctor for 39 year, including 35 as a homeopath.

Dr Broussalian is 52 and according to his website started learning homeopathy at the age of 15.

Dr Lindemann qualified as a doctor in 1986 in Germany and has been a homeopath since 1989.