A fresh row has ignited over homeopathy following England chief medical officer Sally Davies' attack on the industry last week.

Homeopathy experts clashed this week over whether the NHS should continue to fund the treatment, after Ms Davies slammed it as "rubbish" at the House of Commons' Science and Technology committee last Wednesday.

When asked by a Labour MP whether there was a market for homeopathy in the NHS, Ms Davies branded the remedies ineffective. "There's no doubt there's a role for [alternative treatments]," Ms Davies told the committee at a meeting on her annual report, published last November. "I just don't think that homeopathy has that impact."

"Well, I know it's doesn't – why am I being wishy-washy? It's rubbish." Ms Davies argued.

The comments appeared directly against the previously expressed views of health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who signed an early day motion welcoming the "positive contribution" made by NHS homeopathic hospitals in 2007.

Following Ms Davies' comments, the homeopathy industry this week defended NHS funding for the remedies, stressing that they offered patient choice and benefits.

The Faculty of Homeopathy said the prescribing of homeopathic remedies had yielded "many positive results" in randomised controlled trials and observational studies. "Surely, on all issues, the chief medical officer's statements should be based on evidence and informed debate, not on personal opinion," argued Cristal Sumner, chief executive of the Faculty of Homeopathy.

And withdrawing NHS funding for the treatment would contradict government policy to boost patient choice, said homeopathic remedy manufacturer Nelsons. "We believe that people should not be denied access to a treatment that could help them, but should instead be offered a wide range of information to make their own decisions," stressed Najib Fayad, chief operating officer for Nelsons.

"The cost of homeopathy to the NHS is very low – indeed the Department of Health states that, in 2010, around 0.001 per cent of the overall drugs bill was spent on prescriptions for homeopathic medicines," he added.

But the argument was branded "false logic" by Edzard Ernst, former professor and chair in complementary medicine at Exeter University and co-author of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial.

"If I want a glass of champagne each morning on the NHS because it does me good, this expense would also be a small amount compared to the total," he told C+D. "But my champagne would do much more to my body than [homeopathic remedies]. At least it contains active molecules, while homeopathic medicines typically contain none."

"The best clinical evidence fails to show that they work," Mr Edzard argued. "Paying for homeopathy makes a mockery of evidence-based medicine."

Last week, the MHRA banned homeopathic pharmacy Ainsworths from advertising homeopathic remedies as an alternative treatment to childhood vaccines, which caused major debate among C+D readers.