I've know what the core tenants and theories behind homeopathy are. You brought up discredited/obsolete scientific theories earlier. I assert that homeopathy should join those alongside phrenology and the Four Humours.
What are the core tenants and theories?
Basically, the hypothesis (I say "hypothesis" because "theory" implies there's evidence to support it) is that water has a memory. If you make a solution of a drug, then serially dilute it, shaking it violently at each step, it will continue to maintain its pharmacological activity despite being diluted so far that there's a statistically insignificant amount of the original substance left.
Of course, when I say "drug," I don't mean a conventional drug that's found to treat symptoms/sources of disease/sickness. Another tenant of homeopathy is that toxins that cause similar effects to the one being treated are what should be used to trigger the body curing itself. While "conventional" drugs are all toxic to
some degree (for example, chemotherapy's toxicity is also its active use), they're metered very carefully and used in doses where they aren't. Which, I suppose the serial dilutions in homeopathic remedies are supposed to do the same thing. Or dodge the FDA by the loophole that they're selling water.
Anyway, it's an interesting idea, but clinical trials have shot it down time and time again, and nothing over the Placebo Effect has been found during double blind trials where the patients and doctors both didn't know whether they were receiving/giving the medicine or a placebo.
As I said, the "mechanism" is that water has a memory, and retains its shape around solute molecules, or something, however it's supposed to work. One experiment with this was the use of human basophils (a type of white blood cell) that had a homeopathic solution of the anti-body that triggers them into releasing a certain chemical. And it did. The paper was sent to the journal
Nature, and there was a debate over publishing it right away and lending credence to homeopathy by violating various laws of physics and chemistry.
But since science
is open-minded, the study was published, accompanied by a warning that it had not been peer-reviewed (i.e. repeated by other groups), and further research was pending. At the same time, a group of scientists were dispatched to follow-up on the research, and visited the original researchers to check out their experimental method. The experiment was repeated again under the watchful eye of the outside scientists, and it worked successfully again.
Then one of the visiting scientists noticed a caveat of the experiment, and decided to make it a "double-blind" trial for the researchers. So the labels on the test tubes were coded, the codes wrapped in tin foil, placed in an envelope, and taped to the ceiling of the laboratory so they could not be reached. And the experiment promptly stopped working.
Either by deception, or just bad laboratory practices, the serial dilutions were being made into test tubes that had previously contained anti-bodies, and still did in a small but statistically significant amount. And that's what was triggering the basophils.
So yeah. Those are the core tenants of homeopathy, and why homeopathy as a whole is a discredited scientific theory.
Novelist Bunnies: Do you write in order? 
