I'm bored, let's do a thread on Homoeopathy. A few weeks ago I made an offhand comment here about Homoeopathy being bullshit. This seems to have hurt a surprising number of feelings, so allow me to clarify my position. 1/

2/ For context, let's go all the way back. Human anatomy is fairly straightforward, and cadavers have always been around, so our ancestors figured out certain things thousands of years ago. It wasn't hard to understand obvious complaints, like broken bones or external wounds.

3/ They realised that certain plant and animal parts relieved certain symptoms and started using them, though they didn't know the science behind how they worked. They even started doing surgery - pus drainage, bone-setting, trephination, even Caesarians and nasal reconstruction.

4/ Impressive, but they were treating things that had obvious causes. Diagnosis was tricky when the symptoms were vague, like seizures or cough, because they didn't understand physiology yet. So they started guessing at the causes of disease, and came up with various theories.

5/ The Chinese thought it had something to do with the body's energy balance, or Qi. Indians thought it was an imbalance of the three Doshas. The Greeks, Romans, and Persians thought it was an imbalance of the body's four 'Humours' - blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.