If I am critical of an individual or organisation's lack of evidence-base for their (say) choice of medical treatments, should it be valid that my scepticism is countered by resort to massively financially-punitive libel laws?

Surely this is a bullying tactic, not a rational discussion about the quality and nature of evidence for particular interventions, and serves to lower the quality of healthy and intellectual freedom for everyone?

Ever since the enlightenment healthcare has benefitted from evidence-based medicine gradually learning more and more about diseases and has found cures that in previous centuries were only dreamed of. To deny the process of scepticism and rigorous unbiased testing of evidence via resort to libel laws is to my mind a denial of everything that brings progress in medicine - progress is made by discovery of the new and rejection of the unworkable, as measured by the incorruptible arbiter, nature itself. And this progress needs lots of healthy (and at times vociferous) debate. What it does not need is the threat of legal action to stifle it.

Not so much with the BHA but look at this link

http://www.homeopathyworkedforme.org/#/full-story-free-speech/4533927252

I can see where NotFooled is coming from to be fair

"sorry, but what exactly does this have to do with homeopathy or the BHA?"
"this doesn't really have anything to do with either homeopathy or the BHA."
Well... homeopaths, homeopathy organisations, and homeopathy researchers such as George Lewith have been defending the BCA and Lewith has claimed (incorrectly) that Alt Med practitioners prior to the BCA have not threatened critics with law suits (forgetting that blogger Le Canard Noir was threatened with legal action by the Society of Homeopaths). While I think you are both incorrect to state that this has nothing to do with homeopathy, I think you may be correct that this has little or nothing to do with the BHA specifically - as far as I'm aware, the BHA haven't commented on the Singh case or threatened annybody with libel action.

"Although homeopathic doctors have been fasely accused, maligned and criticised, they have yet to take legal action against anyone, so I don't really see the relevance of this question to either homeopathy or the BHA."
The SoH *have* threatened legal action though. I do see the relevance of this to homeopathy in general if not the BHA in particular.

"It is interesting that those who advocate an open minded, rational discussion about these issues, can often be the most closed minded and irrational when they are asked to consider homeopathy! Many critics of homeopathy are so closed minded, they will not even tolerate the thought that homeopathy may be an effective healthcare intervention! Hypocrisy at its worst."
I'm not sure what, in the above comments, you find closed-minded, irrational, or hypocritical. Would you care to expand on this point and point out where, specifically, other commenters have been closed-minded, irrational, or hypocritical?

Lewith's Alternative Memory: http://apgaylard.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/alternative-memory/
Homeopaths against Singh: http://gimpyblog.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/homeopaths-organise-mass-letter-writing-campaign-against-simon-singh-and-applaud-bca/

Re the Singh case: it was tragically inevitable that after years of goading and insults in print that some one in the Complementary Medicine world was going to take someone like Singh to court. But that was the whole point. That is the strategy. Its a depressingly familiar school-child prank: you provoke some poor soul into lashing out and then complain loudly to teacher.
Simon Singh could so easily have made the same points in less inflammatory language and the case would never have been brought against him. And in my view the Chiropractors should risen above it and simply challenged him on the facts.
The idea that this prevents the calm and considered discussion of evidence is facile.