Once again Helen speaks sooth. We were practicing herbal medicine before we were human if evidence of the practices of our cousins the gorillas and chimpanzees is any indicator. When we got to the point were we could think about what we were doing we developed theories about how things work and we went off on our little tangents. Sometimes allopaths will seem to treat symptoms rather than diseases. When we have a fever the fever is a symptom of the body fighting some invader; treating the fever, unless it is so bad that it threatens to fry our little brain, would be counterproductive. So too would be prescribing nothing more than pain killers for a broken leg.

I find AnnaS's point about vaccination being essentially a homeopathic technique to be interesting (No bias here, no sir!).

So what's the difference between allo- and hetero-? Just to keep this post word oriented