While I don’t really support homeopathic medicine, I would encourage people to be careful about openly mocking homeopathic medicine being that only very recently were people better off after seeking medical treatment; and that there are several areas of conventional medical care (psychiatry and back surgery come to mind) that are of very questionable value.

What do you mean by the bolded?

I didn't say that it was morally justifiable, I say that democracy was based on the principle that it was more justifiable than the other way around. Somebody need to decide, whatever it's the minority, the majority or the individual. If you think it should be the majority then you want a democracy, if you think it should be a minority(not meaning ethnic/religious here) then you want some form of technocracy/autocracy/dictariorship, and if you think it should be the individual then you want some form of Anarcho-something.

You can't have a democratic system where individual can decide to not pay tax for a system voted in and wanted by the majority, if you did that the system simply couldn't work. The only way what you want would work in a democracy is if you eliminate the public health system and take the government out of it completly. Whatever the individual want a system that has been voted in by the majority do not enter the equation here.

Your individual tax money may serve to pay for the constuction of a road the other side of the country, a road you will most likely never use, hell you may not even have a car, but the principle of a government is to bind together the resource of all the citizen together to obtain a more efficient and stable whole.

The "I only want to pay tax for what I use" kind of thinking is generaly shorthsigthed too, take my road exemple, you may not have a car and may not personaly use any road, so you ask yourself why you should pay their construction but the market you buy your food at, your boss and your coworker, the teacher at you children school, they use it and thus you too benefit from their construction, just not directly. That same way the individual who do not use the public health system still can indirectly benefit from it.

Sure you can.  There are plenty of laws in modern democracys that protect the rights of minorites which would not ever be repealed.

Right to MEDICAL CARE is far more important than something like roads.  Furthermore, the money I'd get back for taxes on roads... in fact could not be used to buy new roads.

The money someone spends on medical care could in fact go to other medical care.   Because these people are forced to pay for medical insurance they don't want, and medical treatments they don't want... they are deprived of medical treatments they do want because their ability to pay for them has been greatly reduced.

In otherwords... it would be like forcing everybody to pay a tax to provide pork for everbody to eat.

Yet there are plenty of people either by religion, health or just taste reasons who don't want to eat pork.

You are taking away their ability to buy food, because your forcing them to buy food they can't or won't eat.

It is fairly widely accepted that sometime in the past 100 years (or so) we passed a point where the medical treatment you received from a doctor was more likely to do good than harm. At the turn of the last century practices like bloodletting and the use of leeches had finally effectively died out, and we were really starting to see the widespread use of more modern techniques, but the tools, techniques and medicines were still very primitive which limited the effectiveness. Consider (for a moment) that blood transfusions didn't become safe (ish) in humans until 1901 when human blood types were discovered, and a blood transfusion opened people up to the possibility of getting communicable blood borne diseases until the 1980s.

Yeah in the 19th and early 20th century it was safer to get treated at a homeopathic hospital than a normal hospital. Because homeopathic medicine doesn't do you any harm (its just a sugar pill) where as bloodletting and other practices of the time did do you a lot of harm. That isn't the case any more though and there is no evidence to suggest homeopathy works better than a normal placebo.

I think everyone should have the right to the treatment they believe is best for them. That being said, blowjobs make my headaches go away.

But I don't want hundreds of alternative placebos though. It's a waste.

Placebos do have an effect, but I am against homeopathy being used as one in national health. Call me cynical, but I would rather have my national healthcare system focusing on real medicine as opposed placebos that involve mixing wolfs bane with sugar water, shaking it and telling me it will cure my ear infection.

If you want to give a patient a placebo, an inexpensive inert tablet or sham surgery is more than suffice.

If we want to go down the route of providing multiple abstract and resource consuming placebos, then why don't we put faith healing churches in hospitals? Why don't we build reiki regeneration wards? Or crystal healing clinics?

We know that sugar pills are consistent placebos without having to waste money on alternative placebo treatments that have the same level of effectiveness.

And at the moment the government is taking away the ability for the majority to buy meat because they are forcing them to buy tofu for the minority.