Homeopathy

Great post Jessie.
You ask "is it placebo or not?". On an individual basis its impossible to tell although your story about getting constipated from something which you didn't know was constipating is very interesting.

I certainly think you are right that we should be tackling the root causes of our health conditions, not the symptoms.

The principle you describe - that of taking the essence of something and using it to program the body's immune responses is certainly a correct principle, and as you point out forms the basis of vaccination.

However there are 2 points on which homeopathy departs *fundamentally* from the scientific edifice of human knowledge:
1. As you dilute the mixture it gets stronger (this is true for nothing else in science/nature)
2. Homopathic remedies are so diluted that there are literally no atoms present. Atomically it is just water.

So homeopathy claims that water can carry a signature of complex things at *below the atomic level of matter* and then somehow transmit this to the human body. All of this merely by agitation - i.e. mixing the water around. This completely contradicts our knowledge of reality which is based on the atomic model - that all matter is made up of atoms.