Secular Café: Scientific American Declares Homeopathy Indispensable to Planet and Human Health

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

Scientific American Declares Homeopathy Indispensable to Planet and Human Health Apr 3rd 2012, 07:46 Quote: I recently received an e-mail from one of SBM's readers in Brazil, Felipe Nogueira Barbara de Oliveira, a PhD candidate in Medical Science who holds an MS in Computer Science and is who is trying to promote critical thinking and scientific medicine in his country. He sent me a jpeg copy of a short piece that was published (in Portuguese) in the April, 2012 issue of Scientific American Brasil. He was appalled that this appeared under the aegis of Scientific American, and so was I. He provided the translation which follows. Warning: this is painful. Article continues after translation.... Quote: The Questioned Effectiveness of Homeopathy Application of this technique in agriculture shows recuperation of plants and environment. Homeopathy is known as an alternative treatment for human beings, but few people know about its utilization on animals, plants, soils, and water. This technique is the target of critiques regarding results and efficacy. One of them is about the "placebo effect" of its remedies, which do not contain any trace of the raw material used in its preparation. To answer this criticism, a clarification is necessary: homeopathy is not related to chemistry, but to quantum physics, because it works with energy, not with chemical compounds that can be qualified and quantified. The application of homeopathy techniques to agriculture is not recent, as most people might think. One of the first studies in this field dates back to the 20s, with the research on plants carried out by the couple Eugen and Lili Kolisko, based on the theories of Rudolf Steiner about biodynamic agriculture. Since then a lot of studies have been done in countries like France, India, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Cuba, Italy, South Africa, and Brazil. Here the Federal University of Viçosa, in Minas Gerais, is a pioneer in this field. One needn't be a health or environment specialist to realize that the conventional methods of treating agricultural pests and diseases produce a disequilibrium in the ecosystem and, consequently, in human beings. Pathogenic agents and pests acquire, over time, resistance to pesticides (which, by market strategy, have come to be called "agricultural defenses"). Therefore, the quantity and aggressiveness of these chemical products must be increased to overcome this situation, causing a disastrous cascade effect: the soil becomes poorer and its yield is diminished; rural workers get severely sick by constantly handling these toxic products; water supplies, including underground ones, are contaminated; and the people who depend on agricultural products get all this exposure to poison, triggering a series of health problems. With the exception of the pesticide and chemical fertilizer industries, who else benefits from the practice of these conventional treatments? If Hippocrates could reassess his principle of opposites, represented by allopathy, in view of its later consequences on living beings and the environment, he would remove it from his considerations. Today, homeopathy as a sustainable technique, economically viable, and ecologically correct, has become indispensable to the equilibrium of the planet and to the health of all beings that live in it. Author: Nina Ximenes, a biologist and postgraduate environmental education student. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...-human-health/ This is wrong in so many ways, I just hope it was an April fool's joke.

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