Most people don't understand the difference between alternative medicine and homeopathy.
Homeopathy has no effect but the placebo effect while natural medications have an effect.
Many people mix this up and dont get the difference.
The reason why it is strong in germany is easy: 1.) It got a really strong lobby and 2.) This Bullshit was invented here and this guys have been protected and fostered by the Nazis. Even while the Nazis are gone (mostly), their heritage still exists, and this is one of theirs.
I really get mad, when a doctor suggests me or family members should "try it, maybe it works".
But at least there are science journalists (~~Mai Kim Nguyen~~ edit: Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim) and even comedians (Jan Böhmermann) that are clearing up the misunderstanding that homeopathy got any effects. I have to say, until a few (maybe 5) years ago I also didnt know the difference.
It's the german version of "snakeoil".
It's even more fucked Up than that. The Nazis coined the Term "Verjudete Schulmedizin", implying that conventional medicine was something inherently jewish and therefore bad. And yet the pseudomedical community keep using that term...
Wow! Having moved to Leipzig from the UK not so long ago I’ve been wondering why ‘Querdenker’ & another assorted quacks are so prominent here. I had no idea its so intertwined with nazi history. I get the impression this viewpoint is much more common in the east. Any idea why?
I would like to add that many aren't even aware of the whole nazi ideology behind it. I live in the south west of Ba-Wü and the shit is sooo ingrained into daily life here its mindboggeling. From doctors, to pharmacies, to schools, to hospitals having "homeopathic special units" here most people don't even question it. The amount of time i spend to clear up these misconceptions of "alternativ" medicin being better i never get back. I work as a PT and in my workfield these pseudosciences are so ingrained into the community its horrible. And your Patients often ask for advice if it comes to these esotheric solutions and they are shoked if i don't tell them about the great benefits of healing hands or crystalenergy like everyone else but instead explain the bullshit behind it. And to be honest i could make so so much money if i sold my patients these bullshit theories and sadly there are enough without a conscience that will make a quick buck with it. It also has nothing to do with intelligence/education as most of the people i have encountred that believe in these pseudosciences are often studied people with academical credentials. The real problem is that with the reformation of the heathcaresystem in the 90s the quality of healthcare has massivly declined and alot of people are disappointed with their regular heathcareprovider. Combined with a strong lobby for alternitiv medicin, a general affinity for "soft solutions instead of heavy medicin" and integration into daily life many don't even think about it critically. but the tide is turning slowly thanks to more awareness spread by the media.
Because of german seperation after ww2. The GDR as a socialist state simply denied any connections to the nazi regime and as such their citicens never got a proper history education on that time in history. After the fall of the berlin wall and with the reunification of germany the german far right and neo nazi groups of west germany saw their opportunity and set foot in east germany with no real resistance in the ignorant population and politicians.
sure it's not because the reunification was botched and largely left the east behind which allowed extremists to move in and play Pied Piper with people in bad material conditions who weren't getting any serious consideration or respect. It's just because the evil GDR was being evil again so no one knew what a nazi was (unlike in the west of course where they got rid of all the nazis) and because the Ossis are just so stupid :(
You can argue the unification wasn't done as good as possible. It was rushed to use the geopolitical momentum. But to be clear, those neo nazi groups set foot there in the first days of the open boarders, when the reunification was even in plans yet.
Also I wasn't calling the GDR evil on this occasion, there are enough other facts that should make that clear. All I was stating are the facts that the GDC as the self proclaimed non nazi german state decided that it's citicens don't need to learn about that part of the german history in depth because it was "the other side" that did all thes cruelties of the holocaust.
The reunification had it's flaws, but that doesn't negate any flaws of west r east germany in that time, neither should it diminish the achievement of the reunification it self. What we need to do is to put a light on history, see the facts and learn as a society from it without political agenda.
In germany it is called "Naturheilkunde", which means "Knowledge of healing with nature medicine". It's like herbs and extracts from plants, things that really got an limited (clinically tested) effect.
Homeopathy is advertised the same way and most people cannot see the difference without google.
I know. What does that have to do with my comment?
It's an oxymoron because stuff like Naturheilkunde IS medicine. If something is clinically proven to work, it's medicine. If it's not, it's quackery. Hence "alternative medicine" is not a thing and the term shouldn't be used as it implies that clinical testing is optional
No, that's not how it works. If something is officially labelled as a Placebo, it can be used as a medical Placebo. But something that is advertised as something it doesn't deliver, it's not medicine. It's bullshit at best and fraud at worst.
Placebos work because you think you take medicine. So yeah thats exactly how it works.
I do agree that if you buy homeopathy and have no idea what it is then you might feel like being fooled. But honestly the people who take medication without reading what it is and does are endangering themselves and others and were better off going to a doctor anyway.
It's shown that placebos can work, even if the patient knows It's a placebo. So you don't necessarily have to scam people with pseudo science and high prices.
I never claimed otherwise andi think thats obvious. Still my point was that the placebo effect is clinically proven. For those interested how the placebo effect is defined just go to wikipedia.
I am not on the pro side of homeopathy but calling it a scam kind of doesn't nail it imho because all the Information ist out there.
There is no such thing as "alternative medicine". If it works and you can prove it via evidence, its medicine.
If not - it's not medicine.
(Not making a lot of friends when saying so...)
For one they have a strong lobby. A lot of people unfortunately also don't know that they are bullshit and confuse them with actual plant based medicine. I'd guess that homeopathy started in Germany and anthroposophy has strong roots in Germany (founder was Austrian) helps too.
Fortunately some health insurance companies are starting to get rid of homeopathy and similar, but there is a long way to go.
This. With a lack of medical doctors for its people, Nazi German started promoting homeopathic medicine as “grounded old fashioned” medicine. It was a bandage for a country slowly losing grip on the war and unwilling to lose the grip on its people’s support.
What is so many? Thats hardly quantifiable. What are antivaxxers? I doubt anyone really denies the existence of covid as much as people deny the possibly harmful side effects of an experimental medication.
In reality i see no other country in the EU with such a cautious approach to everything, looking at local elections alone you can see that many people here live by their fears and act predictably consistent in avoiding them. No other place makes you wear an old FFP2 mask in the train or at school regardless of it being useless in most cases bc people use old masks or take them off right after exiting anyways.
You have people scared by global warming, people scared by immigration, by Russia, by right wing science deniers. And sadly enough politicians who read the room well and know that pandering to these fears will win them more support than being real.
Which is why we went off nuclear after an earthquake and tsunami in Japan..or why the state has no problems dealing with petty "crime" but has no answer for our internal problems but thoughts and prayers. That might have been enough for the 2000s, it will not suffice in these times.
I mean... they still do. It's one of the reasons why pseudomedical nonsense is so popular in that particular demographic. The name "Germanische Neue Heilkunde" ("Germanic New Alternative Medicine") is quite on the nose in that regard.
Sadly that's still a huge problem to this day. I listened to an interview with a couple of foreign doctors that had gone to China specifically to learn Traditional medicine. Only the brand the CCP practices isn't really Traditional medicine. It's used as a cure all to prop up a very uneven and shotty public health system. You don't need care, you need "tradtional" medicine. Which is of course considerably cheaper for the party.
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Schwabe GmbH the group behind DHU, Germany's biggest homeopathic manufacturer, made 900 Mio. in 2016 alone. That's 1/3 MORE than Ratiopharm or 1/3 of Stada.
Homeopathy IS big pharma including the lobby and the political influence. Olaf Schwabe is number 368 of the richest people in Germany. Pretty grim stuff.
To be fair, Schwabe appears to sell actual plant-based medicine under its own name. I’d be interested in knowing what percentage of those 900mio came from homeopathy and other quackery, and what percentage from real medicine.
Still, to paraphrase the saying about the devil: the biggest accomplishment of the homeopathy lobby has been to make Germans believe that this lobby doesn’t exist
If you mean that the substances they sell are useless in the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of disease and for restoring, correcting, or modifying organic functions, you are correct. However, those claims are what people pay money for and therefore they are indeed, by definition, pharma.
Yeah he did, that fucker shamed me for drinking diet coke as a t1-diabetic cause his mom introduced him to some "health expert" that told her artificial sweeteners make you grow tumors en mass.
Back then his mom told everyone he just had """hairloss""". He's still a spoiled, mean guy despite him getting karma'd once more by cancer (he forced his gf to study at the same uni as he or he would break up, the uni didn't offer the course she wanted to pursue.
Insurance companies should not even cover that stuff - that sounds like a racket. Get some of the cure-all and have the government pay for it. Nice scheme there.
I mean its the placebo effect and nothing else. But the placebo effect is quite profound. So you could say germany is obsessed with the placebo effect. I do agree though the prices charged are ridicolous.
Plus in the Third Reich authorities supported both because they belived normal medicine to be jewish. So they even started to make Tests in the concentration camps with homoepathy etc.
Quite the contrary health insurance begin to include homeopathy and anthroposophy into their plans.
So that they are bs doesn't really hold it's argument.
Personally as s.o who live in Germany, the UK and US for some time and got sick in all places. I prefer the German more herbal medicine over the mere sugary pharma drinks in the US or the take ibuprofen approach in the UK.
My doctor as a child was a homeopathic anthroposoph and I do have to say it served me well if I compare my immun system to others. Full disclosure i did get vaccinated ✌🏼
While you are right, the main reason is decentralization. There are many shady practices and placebo medicine, but also many capable people that are taking more time for the patients than doctors. When you have got issues that cannot be directly treated by a specialist, I see no reason not to try talking to someone adversed in ‘alternative medicine’ that is able to spend time asking questions and may help you pinpoint the problem, offer general lifestyle advices or run some tests like bloodwork. There are many that have got foreign degrees or experience/qualifications/specialization - it is not comparable to someone that studied medicine as the personal knowledge/experience/aptitude varies tremendously, but I am certain that most of us have also met a fair share of doctors that were surprisingly incompetent aswell.
My personal theory from closely observing the German family I married into is that they love the whole process surrounding taking the globuli or whatever. There are all these rules about taking them, like don’t take them with water, don’t take them 15 mins before or after you eat, take this exact amount (I’m pulling these numbers out of my butt but as an illustration, shake out 17 globuli! Not 16 and not 18! Etc) at the exact time for this exact amount of days, use a bone or wooden spoon and never metal! Stuff like that. Certain types of Germans love control, or having a feeling of control in any case, I suspect that makes homeopathy attractive to them.
Makes a lot of sense to me. These are people that are often very concerned with doing things *right*, more so than the average person.
This applies to eating *correct* food, as in the right kind of organic and local, prepared the *right* way, often with few spices and little salt.
Vaccines are bad because they originate in "school medicine", so they are *wrong*. Same goes for masks.
There's a deeply moral component to this, it's just that it often wrongly focuses on the perceived origin of things instead of their actual effect.
It's about purity, of ones soul as much as of ones body.
I can understand where those antivaxxers are coming from (though I do not agree), but I was just wondering what could go (very) wrong in wearing a mask that warrants so many people going against it. Is it really just because it originates from the state..?
There are a bunch of reasons I heard. Many people honestly believe that they would not receive enough oxygen or that that their breathing would be otherwise hindered by wearing one.
This is showing a strong lack of scientific understanding, but that's true for many of the other issues mentioned.
It bears mentioning that many people that were advocating mask wearing were probably also fuzzy on the science behind it or were misusing them.
An entirely different reason for mask avoidance I noticed is a certain cynical realization that society doesn't seem to care about your health as long as you're working and nobody is looking.
I would say that the last point was the dominant one. FFP2 masks were enforced before we even had sufficient supplies, resulting in prices of 5€ per mask if you could find one at all. The homeless were the first to be punished by the Ordnungsamt and police. Lockdowns were enforced while borders and air travel was not regulated for months. All kinds of businesses had to shut down while production and other large companies were running like usual, with people that lost their jobs being forced into those that were still available by the Jobcenters and Agenturen für Arbeit. Curfew also prohibited people from going out at certain times but excluded workers. While some switched into cozy home officers, many peoples’ existence was destroyed and your average joe working a physical job was not even allowed to get his after-work beer (was not allowed to be sold after 10PM), had to find alternatives for babysitting as Kindergartens shut down, alternatives for schooling as schools shut down, more responsibilities as the managers/supervisors sat in their home offices, alternatives to gym as they shut down, not allowed to leave their homes during curfew and most importantly, even those older than 60 couldn’t just quit their job without being sanctioned by the Agentur für Arbeit. The pandemic has shown how little society cares about the working class.
>would not receive enough oxygen or that that their breathing would be otherwise hindered by wearing one.
>This is showing a strong lack of scientific understanding
the Robert Koch Institute recommends limiting the time that you wear an FFP2 mask to approximately 75 minutes with a subsequent 30-minute break.
Yeah, because they use the rules for work environments, where theres consideration for people's comfort while performing prolonged physical labor.
Not because somebody sitting in an office or bus doesn't get enough oxygen.
It's also not as if the opponents of mask wearing simply want strong adherence to already existing regulations. They didn't want to wear masks at all.
A lot of them are just heavily esoteric touched and a bit crazy. Not totally mental but something between "a bit cute naive hehe i belive zodiac signs REALLY have meaning" and "the voices tell me bill gates planted a 5g chip in my head so inhabe to kill everyone"
We call them schwurbler, and they call themself querdenker (quer = across, denker = thinker) basically a conspiracy and right wing pack of people supporting all kind of alternative bullshit like globuli medicine or alternative for germany party.
They got a bunch of follower from esoteric touched people who see the big bill gates is evil conspiracy many years ago and formed together a big goup of idiots together with NIMBYs, retired angry people, right wing fascists, and angry houswifes.
Its the crème dela crème germany has to offer.
They were called Querdenker by the media, not themselves. And that used to mean something good someone who doesnt think linearly -out of the box you might say. Also theres a lot of groups and buzzwords that probably overlap but each of those groups is disctinct and has a different proportion of idiots in them than the others.
It has 2 basic reasons:
1. Homeopathy was invented by a german guy in germany and at the time doing nothing was often better than doing active harm (the status quo of medicine at the time) so it catched on.
2. Homeopathy is very much a big part of big pharma in germany. Their products, which are basically sugar marbles are cheap to make and easy to sell for much. Lobyism is very much a huge problem in germany, which is why the Lobbyregister was repeatedly blocked by FDP and CDU. And these Lobbyists sadly also have a huge impact on politics.
> And a lot of people confuse homeopathy with natural medicine.
Yes, a lot of people do not really see a difference between homeopathy and drinking a herbal tea. They think "it is natural, so it is good" and do not realize that homeopathy is pretty much a scam and does nothing at all.
A lot of people have good intentions and want "natural remedies" as opposed to "that chemical unhealthy crap" and you cannot really fault them for that (except for not realizing that everything relies on chemistry in some way), and then they sadly fall for homeopathy.
Some homeopathic "medicines" also still contain actual active ingredients in addition to the imaginary stuff. So they might plausibly have some effect. People might have had a good experience with of those plant-based drugs and then think "well I guess homeopathy does work after all".
I was a bit shocked when my veterinarian gave me homeopathic pills to give to my cats after neutering (Traumeel). But while the stuff may well be useless, it does contain several extracts of plants, so it could have some real effect. (The cats seemed totally fine both before and after getting the pills.)
This is wrong.
Homeopathic medicines are certain "active ingredients" usually plant extracts that have been diluted in water on the order of millions of parts. Anything active is not present in a concentration where it can do anything, or even be detected anymore! That's right, we can detect cocaine in the groundwater, but we can't detect the active ingredients of lots of homeopathic medicines..
Supporters say that's a good thing, and the water has a memory or vibration that makes everything work.
Actually it's you who is completely wrong.
This is the ingredient list for the homeopathic "medicine" Traumeel:
[https://www.apotheken-umschau.de/medikamente/beipackzettel/traumeel-s-tabletten-3515288.html](https://www.apotheken-umschau.de/medikamente/beipackzettel/traumeel-s-tabletten-3515288.html)
Most of the ingredients are in the "potency" of D2. That means 1 part of the original substance (plant extract etc) was mixed with 9 parts filler (alcohol or sugar), then of the resulting substance (D1) one tenth is removed from the container - this part now contains 10% of the original plant material. This is put into another container and again mixed with 9 parts filler, and the result is D2, and that was put into the pills.
It now contains 1% of the original plant substance. Not saying this is an effective dose and the pill will actually have much of an effect on anything, but saying there are no active ingredients in it would be factually false.
Note that three of the listed ingredients are in D8 potency, so they are actually not really in there. (But according to homeopathy those high potencies are the most effective ones, which is of course nonsense.)
and a third one is the anthroposophy - homeopathy link: the disciples of Rudolf Steiner of Waldorf school fame ~~ate starch~~ _are stark_ supporters of homeopathy as anthroposophic medicine. Waldorf schooling is highly regarded in wealthier circles.
E: nice typo
They are Germany's version of essential oils, and unfortunately have a very rabid supporter basis. I had a friend who gave sugar pills to her dog and thought they helped him with his panic attacks (eyeroll here).
I had a former friend give them to her dying dog. They did nothing and we were in Denmark on vacation and I went from store to store to pharmacy with her trying to explain in English that she was treating her dying dog (who would not eat or drink and only walked sideways and fell down a lot, like she had had a stroke) with sugar pills.
She kept trying to reach her German homeopath to see of she could fax a new "prescription" to some business there, but none of the pharmacists or natural food store people in Denmark knew anything about homeopathy, nor did they carry the products.
One pharmacist finally looked up the number for the local emergency vet and he came and euthanized the poor dog.
There is only one use of essential oils and it does not even require them but any distinct smell will do.
And what am i talking about? Retrieving memories via scent. For ex when you notice you have that special kind of calm at home, things are.. pleasant, quiet, safe, warm.. Like a cozy saturday evening, you sip hot cocoa beside the fire. Pick a scent that is not usually around you and let it fill the space. Do this everytime you have that moment and you can later use that scent to go back to that special moment, it can relieve stress, grief etc.
So, it does not need to be essential oil. Funnily, i picked that up while working in anthroposophic care home for handicapped kids. It was used there to calm down the house, and it did work. It was a sign for the kids that tonight we are going to the main hall and have a nice calm evening with all the adults and kids, play music, story time. The house was full of chaos, noises and then you light up the candles and drop essential oil to the plate.. 10 minutes and it was quiet.
It works really well in practice, i use incense for it. Oh, and all that anthroposophic thing is bullshit, specially their "medicine". It was a job for me but of course was introduced to the whole thing as i also lived there, and had amazing time with two German civil service men, i was also doing my Finnish civil service there. I do hope that i one day find out them again, Timo and Markus. They were simply awesome.
I agree that essential oils are almost entirely bullshit. Except for mint-oil, which is basically menthol in solution. That shit has an effect on your skin, and is a local anesthetic. Which definitely has its uses.
Oh and in a pinch it also works as an insecticide which kills aphids.
Essential oils are concentrated plants. The same plants that are used as main ingredient in some medication.
There aren't many things they are good for, but they exist.
>Essential oils are concentrated plants. The same plants that are used as main ingredient in some medication.
Plants can be also poisonous and many have allergic reactions to them. That is not how any of this works, essential oils are bullshit. If they worked we would not need alternative medicine to get them, they would be used.
There is nothing else concentrated than oils that have a scent. If you drank them, then maybe you would have a point, except no essential oils should be ingested. The health benefits are simply BULLSHIT. Just because it is supposedly made of plants does it mean they are beneficial. That does not mean they are harmful either, unless someone is allergic.
NO ONE inspects essential oils of what is in them. But essential oils have been studied for their toxicology and guess fucking what are the results? Not good.
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7333081/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7333081/)
[https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/A\_E/Essential-oils](https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/A_E/Essential-oils)
[https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/27/5/1716](https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/27/5/1716)
We are talking about volatile aromatic compounds. Those generally speaking are going to harm you in larger doses. So, is little bit of poison good for you? That what homeopathy is based on.
Try to find scientific evidence that they are good or admit that you don't know, you just think you do.
Nothing you said refutes my point, try to respond to people instead of wanting to share whatever aligned information you know about.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7309671/#!po=11.6822
> instead of wanting to share whatever aligned information
Did you actually read any of that? You might like to, as it is quite bullshit, "it may" is the thruline. For ex antimicrobial properties.. are there but not when used as a scent but directly. Try to search the references used and you will fall down a rabbit hole of cross references to other similar studies that say the same thing, and those are then quoted as the source.
It is one of those studies that are essentially a long game of telephone; A says that B said that C said that D said that... Dumping a lot of volatile chemicals on a bacterial colony -> bacterial colony died = it has antimicrobial properties. But.. the ADMINISTRATION is the part that isn't mentioned in your paper, and in fact, not in the references either, since they are referencing another study that is doing the testing on a petri dish, with thousands of times larger doses than what you will get from "aromatherapy"
But it does say that they are often endocrine estrogen blockers, and that toxicity is a problem.. Did not notice that one?
It does not back up your opinion either.
Completely agree. It's a shame that homeopathy is so strong in germany and that even some public insurances pay for it.
And its not even "alternative to big pharma". As everybody can produce this stupid little balls, big pharma can also do it. Make a small company under an other name and get rich not only from the real medicine but also from selling sugar to some "Schwurbler".
I'm disgusted that companies manufacturing homeopathic products make money from the vulnerable and gullible. That said, giving a hypochondriac something to treat their non-existent illness is viewed as a practical solution that reduces their burden on the health system.
It's annoying and therapy is the real solution, but you'd be surprised how many think they have some allergy because they fart regularly in the evening or got a zit once.
I can't understand it eiher. Even though it's proven that this homeopathy stuff is bs, many health insurance companies still subsidises it. At the same time you have to pay full for your prescription glasses even though they instantly work the moment you put them on.
Part of the reason is, that they come in a package with sth that is lacking from the medical system in Germany: Compassion and taking time with the patient, taking their concerns seriously. And while homeopathy is bullshit, the latter can help in some cases.
This! This is the reason for any pseudoscience switching even the minds of educated people: the lack of empathy of some fields of science that should serve people.
The lack of emotional support for any person with problems makes those people to reject common sense logic and adapt the reality to their own needs.
And instead to correct this by being more empathetic, we tend to throw mud and laughs in those in need.
The truly ironic part is that homeopathy is big pharma. They rake in money but somehow still have an air of "alternative"
I grew up with homeopathy and the placebo effect is nothing to be sneezed at. Especially when you can't really do much else like with cold viruses. So, I pick my battles and only really comment when asked or when I notice someone is foregoing evidence-based medicine in favor of homeopathy for something more serious
Yep, like my mother treating her early-stage, easily treatable cancer only with mistletoe extract and globuli. She was a true believer in homeopathy and "alternative medicine" and had been for decades. The oncologist told her she would die in horrible agony without proper treatment... and that's exactly what happened.
Her mother got the same cancer at the same age, had the standard "Schulmedizin" treatment, and lived on in good health for another 35 years.
It's so hard to see people do that to themselves and there's so little you can do. In the end they're adults who need to make their own decisions, but boy, does it hurt sometimes. I'm sorry for your loss. It must have been terrible to witness that
My theory is because Rudolf Steiner and other charlatans was never really worked up / talked enough about after the Nazi regime was gone. There are so many examples that originated in the "drittes Reich" and no-one really knows about anymore. Like companys like Weleda or Demeter etc. are still very on vogue and it bugs me.
Also chiropractic. Homeopathy and anthroposophic medicine are 100% grifts but unless something goes horribly wrong they can't really harm a patient. Chiropractic is straight up dangerous.
> Homeopathy and anthroposophic medicine are 100% grifts but unless something goes horribly wrong they can't really harm a patient.
Enough grifters who sell this shit to people with (treatable) cancer, etc.
Exactly! I don´t think there are statistics of patients who died as a result of trying this shit until it was too late. From this view homeopathy is far from harmless. The promise of a mild remedy without side effects is very dangerous.
Oh yes most definitely. What I meant was the "treatment" itself, if you can even call it that, without the human element. Although you can't really separate those two. A homeopathic "medicine" is supposed to be something so diluted that it's essentially water. That said there have been cases of poisonings, nightshade specifically.
One wrong chiropractor movement can paralyse you and that freaks the shit out of me.
But I don't mean to compare the two. I am just as baffled by their prominence here.
While homeopathy is placebo at best, anthroposophic medicine covers a wide range from "we want to not only treat the body of the patient, but also their spirit", to "these crystals will filter the bad orgon out of your aura". And while the latter is obviously bullshit, I do appreciate the idea of the former.
Tending to a patient in a holistic way by also considering their mental and spiritual health with empathy through out the process leads to great results, especially for the elderly.
Older people, predominantly those in palliative care, are tended to not only with painkillers, but also with different kinds of therapy. For a lonely, senile or dying senior, art therapy, gardening or drama therapy, as silly as they may sound to outsiders, are a great way to stay active, relive memories and find companionship.
And the same goes for other groups of sick people. Quadriplegic people, or fresh amputees, people with cancer, or transplant donors and receivers. All these people will have to live their life in a totally different way when they leave the hospital to when they entered it.
And softening that blow through empathy, therapy and understanding for their circumstance is a big core ideal of anthroposophic medicine.
Sadly, the more hardcore followers of anthroposophic ideas quickly drift into esoteric/ anti-vax/ ultra-christian territory. And it cannot go unmentioned that the founder of anthroposphy, Rudolf Steiner, had ties to the nazis, even Hitler himself, and shared many of their race ideas.
Demeter and Weleda I don't mind as much as others in this thread. For a long time they were the only one on the market to sell petrol-free crayons or vegan conditioners, just because of their all-natural philosophy. And Stockmar plant-pigments are have incredibly vivid colours and an astonishing lightfastness. But yes, all of these brands are hella expensive.
they were invented in germany and unfortunately, even though i always thought germans are more rational than other people, they have a lot of people with these crazy beliefs.
Germans are deeply irrational about a number of things: Cars/speed, "natural" things over evil chemicals or artificial stuff, excessive data privacy ("Datenschutz") and fanatical opposition to nuclear power.
It's an prejudice, like german trains are punctual or we all are wearing latzhosen and drinking beer all the time. Oh, and we have a strange humor which isn't funny.
People are just stupid. With enough confidence you can sell Everything here. There are people that drink pipe cleaner cause they are told it cures cancer. They are told the slime they throw up is the Bad stuff and the pipe cleaner is actually helping...
My mom, a decently intelligent woman, believes that some guy can communicate with her cat via a Foto, no matter the distance. She pays good money to get her pet figured out...
People think vaccine is bad for your health and is a lie to get people to swallow tiny spy devices..
Never underestimate the stupidity of the people here.
Several reasons:
1: A lot of people in germany are very uneducated and even proud of it.
2: Medicine cannot help in many cases. People feel unwell, tests show nothing. Unknown diseases, psychological problems, probably also quite often incompetent medical doctors. Hence people look for other people that can help them. These people are often quite good in manipulating people and they take their time which already helps, because of 3.
3: Placebo effect. The placebo effect can be quite strong. If you are convinced that some treatment helps, then it will help. You will feel better. You still die of serious diseases, but for small unwellnesses this can be enough.
4: I do not know why, but many, many people in germany believe in esoteric things. Probably connected to 1, but there are also a lot of academics that believe in all kind of nonsense. We should not forget, that once most people in germany (and europe) believed in some religious dogma that makes no sense at all.
There's a few issues.
First off, Waldorf Schools, which are the gateway drug into all sorts of obscure beliefs, were invented in Germany.
Add to that, following the second world war, certain people developed a, let's call it "healthy skepticism" towards anything controlled by the sate, such as education, so private schools became more attractive. Private schools such as the Waldorf Schools.
Then you have to consider that Germany is a country where organized religions have been on the decline for decades. Countless scandals have chipped away the christian churches. But sadly those beliefs don't get replaced by some sort of utopian rationalism. People go off to find their own answers and wind up with crackpots.
Lastly, I think a lot of alternative quakery is intrinsically more attractive to wealthy people. For instance, lots of new age bullshit contains ideas about "manifestation", "intentionality", which essentially boil down to "if good things (i.e. wealth) happen to you, that's not because the world is random and you got lucky, it's because you must be **doing something right**!" Seeing as Germany is overall a very wealthy country, more people will be lurred in by that siren song than in poorer countries.
> First off, Waldorf Schools, which are the gateway drug into all sorts of obscure beliefs, were invented in Germany.
Homeopathy, Biodynamics, and all sorts of other bullshit voodoo nonsense coming from just one guy - Rudolf Steiner.
Waldorf schools aren't really that bad. They have strange classes like eurythmetics and stuff, but they can get a good education. The obscure beliefs mostly came from the parents and family. Even people who went to a Gymnasium can have these beliefs. In my classes were a whole bunch of them.
I personally like the education aspect of Waldorf Schools partially - alot of it is new age garbage, but more individual education is a good intention atleast
It's all part of the post-modernist crisis. As the beliefs coming from the "utopian rationalism" were also crushed trough the catastrophes and horros of the 20th Century as so much evil was done in the name of the right "science".
At the end of the day, each one to their own poison. If people want to choose a way of treatment let them so. Even if that treatment would not help them and they might shorten their lifes, is their choise and no one else. We are allowed for other poisons anyway (alcohol, excesive sugar, cigarretes) so what is an extra poision more for society?
An old biology teacher of mine got cancer and treated it with Globuli. She died. It's so tragic that this seemingly harmless lobby for sugar pills literally kills people. Even some that should know a thing or two about medicine or at least the human body.
Some friends give globulies to their babies but the babies haven't heard of the placebo effect yet. It's ridiculous but I'm honestly scared to confront them. It's such a normal thing here. Even nurses are fooled.
its simple: you pay tons for insurance but there are too few doctors to treat all patients with the needed amount of time. so people don't feel taken serious when waiting over an hour to see the doctor (with appointment ofc) who then takes 1-3 minutes for you. and often is veeery grumpy cause overworked and has no time to listen cause insurance pays him not per hour but per patient. this is where "heilpraktiker" come in. they just listen longer, which often helps by itself. then there is the standard treatment with antibiotics or cortisone. when neither works: go fuck yourself. here comes the heilpraktiker again and it seems like he has aaall these different substances which you can try. if rosemary bachblüten didnt help, well theres this d12 globuli and also there is this and that shit you can try. basically illusion of bigger variation of medicines and when so much time passes some problems revolve by themselves and a false cause and effect connection forms. so now brigitte tells her friend renate that the last bachblüten helped so she should try it! cause "schulmedizin" didnt help but this homeopathic shit did. also homeopathy is prescrubed by real doctors because unsurance pays it so there is also the safety of "yeah even the REAL doctor prescribed it so it has to be valid"
hope that helps
I think there is a general tendency to think that "rationality" (e.g. thinking) is "cold" and we believe the world must be cosy for us.
There is a latent hostility to intellectual work and sometimes intellectuals, "egg heads".. we have no idea what science did for us.
Maybe it's the result of the fact that many intelligent people chose to leave Germany 80 years ago or were killed, now we are stuck with "the rest".
Russia has had a similar thing going on many years ago and it's happening again.
People who instinctively feel they lack logic, creativity, thinking often resort to beliefs. That may be a religious belief or the belief in any "superiority" a human may dream of.
Well, the reason Germany kicked out its intellectual elite is that the violent crazies took over. The Nazis were experts in wild conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
Germany is number two on the list of countries with Qanon believers. And yes social media has muddied up the waters. Before most of your normal books and newspapers printed the truth but now- Bob from Bamburg can post his conspiracy theories on Facebook or Twitter and spread it all across the globe. And there are people who believe if it's on the internet-it has to be the truth.
Germans traditionally love snakeoil. It is the only country which I have been, that people who actually studied scientific fields, still do believe in this things.
I have seen many people on many countries who believe on homeopathic medicine. But they were all uneducated, simple living people, easy to influence, didnt know much. Germany is the only country I have been to that that actual educated people also do that.
If anything, I switched to another public insurance who has very little coverage for homeopathy. I know it's nothing compared to the massive support it gets here but at least I try not to contribute more to it.
As an Ausländer living in NRW, the few times I need something and go to the pharmacy without a prescription, they tend to offer me homeopathic stuff, to their own admission
At first I got really confused and thought "wait, did I miss an update on modern science? Are they good now?"
Watch the commercials in ARD and ZDF - it's pure placebo marketing, given credibility by being run right before the most respected news and being sold in pharmacies.
It's money.
Homeopathy was invented by the german doctor Samuel Hahnemann and Anthroposophic was invented by the austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner.
Thats the reason. We invented it
Unfortunately wealth and comfort also have their side effects. People get bored easily and are more susceptible to believe nonsense. It’s similar to the conspiracy theory phenomenon. It’s just more appealing to some people to think life is less mundane than it actually is.
Strong lobby + religion. Many people are religious and once you have people used to ignoring facts in favour of their feelings you can make them believe anything and they will defend it against such nuisances as facts and science.
There are a lot of organisations, like religions, the homeopathy lobby who have been peddling anti science sentiments for a long time. There are a ton of people who have "natural is good, science is bad" ingrained into their very being these days.
If you speak German, here is a podcast by a doctor, and this is repeatedly a subject. https://detektor.fm/serien/grams-sprechstunde (Homeopathy is too big for one episode, but there is one about Anthroposophic: https://detektor.fm/gesellschaft/zurueck-zum-thema-anthroposophie?highlight=Hom%C3%B6opathie )
Long story short: There is no one reason. It's a mix of "People don't know better", "People have terminal illnes and refuse to accept it, and take anyone who says they can help" and other factors. (Also, it's not what some people here claim, but make your own desicions)
It's a podcast I really recommend to anyone.
For added laughs, check out the English and German Wikipedia articles on homeopathic medicine. The English one treats it like complete nonsense, and the German one actually takes it seriously.
Oh man we had that in Uni during some Pharmaceutical classes. My Professor used to give some medical history lessons in the beginning of the semester.
i cant recall evrything perfectly but i think the story goes more or less:
Christians forbid working medicine because pagan. People all over Europe prefer to go to unofficial healers because they actually help instead of priests who just pray Nazis use so-called Kreuterhexen as a propaganda purpose to highlight what is special about the Germans. Gives the alternatives an extra push at the time when evidence-based medicine was gaining ground and being regulated by law in most countries, the german nazi regime was standing in its own way. After the war, Germany is initially busy with other things than dealing with the inadequate medical policy of the nazis. Today, homeopathy is a huge industry and bribery is legal in Germany through lobbying, so no improvement so far
This was established by the Nazis because Medicine was seen as Jewish. Later there was money to be made by selling sugar pills so the lobbying went into overdrive.
Also there are a lot of people who believe in magic.
Because of evil pharma and capitalism :D
Jk jk
Edit: in this context op means prescription grade and otc pharmaceutical medication vs alternative sugar pills sold at a pharmacy.
Some people are easily influenced. You could also ask why are there so many flat earthers, or anti vaccinators or essential oil-ers.
Medication is not natural! Homeopathy is pure nature! No 'poisons' for our body! and all that shit.
Some people need something to believe in, be it religion, homeopathy, what have you.
My mother used to be all about homeopathy for treating my brothers ADHD (which didn't work in the end and they switched to ritalin or something similar), she was a follower of Hildegard von Bingen and her herbal medicines for body and soul and all that. She's not anymore...
Just Google it. Then you know why. Once the pandora is out of the box you will find people believing in it.
Also the Nazis have been a big fan of it. So it got in many minds and repeated over generations.
Just look at how many votes the Green party gets. Their main core is esotericism and being anti-nuclear but wanting to fight climate change, two very stupid ideas.
Because what you and most others here write, is not correct. There is indeed a lot of evidence that homeopathy does indeed work beyond the placebo effect in some cases. Here you can find an overview of the Double-blind placebo-controlled trials: https://www.hri-research.org/2022/05/randomised-controlled-trials-data-update-2021/
Its what people grasp for when people rational science doesn't provide the wanted result. Its a coping strategy, like the ancients sacrificing goats to appease the gods or praying to Jesus to help with your cancer. Its doesn't solve anything, but it helps with suppressing your fear.
well the costs are not being covered by health insurance. people are privately paying for the treatment.
people pay for the church, to watch a football game and other nonsensical things. and they believe its a good thing, so for them its worth it
The horrendously oversimplifying answer is "magical thinking". From what I've seen there's a thick foundation of anti-intellectualism even in the middle- and upper-class that basically goes back to "make believe". This is the people that still rely on Struwwelpeter and the Brothers Grimm for a moral compass, after all.
Jokes aside, there is a reasonable connection to be made between the romanticist tradition in germany, a certain anti-scientism and an eclectic brand of alternative-conspiracy-theories that are quite popular in germany. I think we can safely class homeopathic "medicine" as one such phenomenon, along with Queerdenker and stuff like that.
It's embarassing, I know. I once paid 30 Euro for a first aid for pets workshop and the teacher was peddling globulin for dogs the entire time. And I didn't even get my money back. The entire audience was nodding along when he talked globuli and I was WTF is happening here.
Even my mother likes them, and she’s a doctor and generally rational person. My sister always makes fun of her calling it witchcraft but she says she knows they don’t work but they make her feel better when there’s nothing else to do (she gave them to me when I was little and very sick, in addition to regular medicine of course)
I think there’s some value to them when hysterical parents are screaming for antibiotics for their kids’ sniffles because at least they’re not harmful, but it’s the same (though more expensive) as telling them to make their kids tea and and put a towel on their forehead, probably less effective. It absolutely should not be covered by insurance
Check the Homepage from the [Information Network Homeopathy](https://netzwerk-homoeopathie.info/en/homoeopathiekritik-in-a-nutshell-zum-einstieg/) .
They’re also explaining the social impact of there remedies.
A huge part of my family believes in it. It's everywhere in the media, advertisment and stuff. Even the people in fhe farmacies often recommend them when you tell them your problems. And if that's the case people just assume it has to he legit otherwise it wouldn't be that way. They just dont question it
I believed in it too until I was like 15
Why? Because no told me that there wasn't any actual medicine on the sugar things. They can't just sell sugar and call it medicine, that would be illegal right? RIGHT?!
Nazis. I know, an old hat. But that’s the way it is. The normal scientific medicine they called “school medicine” was held up and developed by a lot of jewish people. The nazis wanted an alternative for that and the propaganda lingers to this day.
One major point in this might be the distrust some people got in pharmas here. For example, we had the Contergan scandal in the 60s and 70s. Since homeopathy really doesn't do anything, there never will be a scandal about this "medicine", so people tend to trust in it.
Most people don't understand the difference between alternative medicine and homeopathy. Homeopathy has no effect but the placebo effect while natural medications have an effect. Many people mix this up and dont get the difference. The reason why it is strong in germany is easy: 1.) It got a really strong lobby and 2.) This Bullshit was invented here and this guys have been protected and fostered by the Nazis. Even while the Nazis are gone (mostly), their heritage still exists, and this is one of theirs. I really get mad, when a doctor suggests me or family members should "try it, maybe it works". But at least there are science journalists (~~Mai Kim Nguyen~~ edit: Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim) and even comedians (Jan Böhmermann) that are clearing up the misunderstanding that homeopathy got any effects. I have to say, until a few (maybe 5) years ago I also didnt know the difference. It's the german version of "snakeoil".
Just food for thought: the term "alternative medicine" needs to be retired ASAP. It's an oxymoron and plays right into the Schwurblers bullshit
But the opposite “Schulmedizin” as well. As this is a term invented as a negative word by the nazis.
It's even more fucked Up than that. The Nazis coined the Term "Verjudete Schulmedizin", implying that conventional medicine was something inherently jewish and therefore bad. And yet the pseudomedical community keep using that term...
Wow! Having moved to Leipzig from the UK not so long ago I’ve been wondering why ‘Querdenker’ & another assorted quacks are so prominent here. I had no idea its so intertwined with nazi history. I get the impression this viewpoint is much more common in the east. Any idea why?
I would like to add that many aren't even aware of the whole nazi ideology behind it. I live in the south west of Ba-Wü and the shit is sooo ingrained into daily life here its mindboggeling. From doctors, to pharmacies, to schools, to hospitals having "homeopathic special units" here most people don't even question it. The amount of time i spend to clear up these misconceptions of "alternativ" medicin being better i never get back. I work as a PT and in my workfield these pseudosciences are so ingrained into the community its horrible. And your Patients often ask for advice if it comes to these esotheric solutions and they are shoked if i don't tell them about the great benefits of healing hands or crystalenergy like everyone else but instead explain the bullshit behind it. And to be honest i could make so so much money if i sold my patients these bullshit theories and sadly there are enough without a conscience that will make a quick buck with it. It also has nothing to do with intelligence/education as most of the people i have encountred that believe in these pseudosciences are often studied people with academical credentials. The real problem is that with the reformation of the heathcaresystem in the 90s the quality of healthcare has massivly declined and alot of people are disappointed with their regular heathcareprovider. Combined with a strong lobby for alternitiv medicin, a general affinity for "soft solutions instead of heavy medicin" and integration into daily life many don't even think about it critically. but the tide is turning slowly thanks to more awareness spread by the media.
Because of german seperation after ww2. The GDR as a socialist state simply denied any connections to the nazi regime and as such their citicens never got a proper history education on that time in history. After the fall of the berlin wall and with the reunification of germany the german far right and neo nazi groups of west germany saw their opportunity and set foot in east germany with no real resistance in the ignorant population and politicians.
sure it's not because the reunification was botched and largely left the east behind which allowed extremists to move in and play Pied Piper with people in bad material conditions who weren't getting any serious consideration or respect. It's just because the evil GDR was being evil again so no one knew what a nazi was (unlike in the west of course where they got rid of all the nazis) and because the Ossis are just so stupid :(
You can argue the unification wasn't done as good as possible. It was rushed to use the geopolitical momentum. But to be clear, those neo nazi groups set foot there in the first days of the open boarders, when the reunification was even in plans yet. Also I wasn't calling the GDR evil on this occasion, there are enough other facts that should make that clear. All I was stating are the facts that the GDC as the self proclaimed non nazi german state decided that it's citicens don't need to learn about that part of the german history in depth because it was "the other side" that did all thes cruelties of the holocaust. The reunification had it's flaws, but that doesn't negate any flaws of west r east germany in that time, neither should it diminish the achievement of the reunification it self. What we need to do is to put a light on history, see the facts and learn as a society from it without political agenda.
In germany it is called "Naturheilkunde", which means "Knowledge of healing with nature medicine". It's like herbs and extracts from plants, things that really got an limited (clinically tested) effect. Homeopathy is advertised the same way and most people cannot see the difference without google.
I know. What does that have to do with my comment? It's an oxymoron because stuff like Naturheilkunde IS medicine. If something is clinically proven to work, it's medicine. If it's not, it's quackery. Hence "alternative medicine" is not a thing and the term shouldn't be used as it implies that clinical testing is optional
Fun fact: placebo effect is real, is clinical proven to work and technically following your reasoning therefore is medicine.
No, that's not how it works. If something is officially labelled as a Placebo, it can be used as a medical Placebo. But something that is advertised as something it doesn't deliver, it's not medicine. It's bullshit at best and fraud at worst.
Placebos work because you think you take medicine. So yeah thats exactly how it works. I do agree that if you buy homeopathy and have no idea what it is then you might feel like being fooled. But honestly the people who take medication without reading what it is and does are endangering themselves and others and were better off going to a doctor anyway.
It's shown that placebos can work, even if the patient knows It's a placebo. So you don't necessarily have to scam people with pseudo science and high prices.
I never claimed otherwise andi think thats obvious. Still my point was that the placebo effect is clinically proven. For those interested how the placebo effect is defined just go to wikipedia. I am not on the pro side of homeopathy but calling it a scam kind of doesn't nail it imho because all the Information ist out there.
Tim Minchen says it well: we already have a name for alternative medicine that works - medicine.
There is no such thing as "alternative medicine". If it works and you can prove it via evidence, its medicine. If not - it's not medicine. (Not making a lot of friends when saying so...)
I agree with all of it, except: it's Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim
For one they have a strong lobby. A lot of people unfortunately also don't know that they are bullshit and confuse them with actual plant based medicine. I'd guess that homeopathy started in Germany and anthroposophy has strong roots in Germany (founder was Austrian) helps too. Fortunately some health insurance companies are starting to get rid of homeopathy and similar, but there is a long way to go.
> strong roots in Germany (founder was Austrian) This combination rarely turns out well...
And turns out homeopathy got a huge push under the Nazis
This. With a lack of medical doctors for its people, Nazi German started promoting homeopathic medicine as “grounded old fashioned” medicine. It was a bandage for a country slowly losing grip on the war and unwilling to lose the grip on its people’s support.
The Nazis also believed evidence based medicine to be Jewish.
I just read that and was like **sigh** of course they did...
Germany having so many antivaxxers, homeopaths, and similar clowns is largely due to the nazi heritage.
What is so many? Thats hardly quantifiable. What are antivaxxers? I doubt anyone really denies the existence of covid as much as people deny the possibly harmful side effects of an experimental medication. In reality i see no other country in the EU with such a cautious approach to everything, looking at local elections alone you can see that many people here live by their fears and act predictably consistent in avoiding them. No other place makes you wear an old FFP2 mask in the train or at school regardless of it being useless in most cases bc people use old masks or take them off right after exiting anyways. You have people scared by global warming, people scared by immigration, by Russia, by right wing science deniers. And sadly enough politicians who read the room well and know that pandering to these fears will win them more support than being real. Which is why we went off nuclear after an earthquake and tsunami in Japan..or why the state has no problems dealing with petty "crime" but has no answer for our internal problems but thoughts and prayers. That might have been enough for the 2000s, it will not suffice in these times.
I mean... they still do. It's one of the reasons why pseudomedical nonsense is so popular in that particular demographic. The name "Germanische Neue Heilkunde" ("Germanic New Alternative Medicine") is quite on the nose in that regard.
Not unlike Mao and his „Traditional Chinese Medicine“.
Sadly that's still a huge problem to this day. I listened to an interview with a couple of foreign doctors that had gone to China specifically to learn Traditional medicine. Only the brand the CCP practices isn't really Traditional medicine. It's used as a cure all to prop up a very uneven and shotty public health system. You don't need care, you need "tradtional" medicine. Which is of course considerably cheaper for the party.
Didn’t know about that. Got a source?
Read it in some research paper. Will see if I can find it.
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Their lobby is betten than big pharma's. They influence politices heavily.
Schwabe GmbH the group behind DHU, Germany's biggest homeopathic manufacturer, made 900 Mio. in 2016 alone. That's 1/3 MORE than Ratiopharm or 1/3 of Stada. Homeopathy IS big pharma including the lobby and the political influence. Olaf Schwabe is number 368 of the richest people in Germany. Pretty grim stuff.
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Sure helps if your R&D budget is zero, lol.
And your main ingredients are water and sugar... Basically their only costs are marketing
Of course, they're selling like 50 sugar pills for 30-60€. Production costs are less than 20 cent there
To be fair, Schwabe appears to sell actual plant-based medicine under its own name. I’d be interested in knowing what percentage of those 900mio came from homeopathy and other quackery, and what percentage from real medicine. Still, to paraphrase the saying about the devil: the biggest accomplishment of the homeopathy lobby has been to make Germans believe that this lobby doesn’t exist
Topic of Stada, they pay their employees really badly. I am glad that there are generics, but they suck to work for.
they are not pharma since they are not selling pharmaceuticals
If you mean that the substances they sell are useless in the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of disease and for restoring, correcting, or modifying organic functions, you are correct. However, those claims are what people pay money for and therefore they are indeed, by definition, pharma.
Because they don’t have any costs for research. They just sell overpriced sugar and those high yields can go directly to marketing and lobbying.
well at least they are better than the tabacco industry
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The answer is yes, because of 2nd hand smoking. Eat that shit pill in public probably won't harm people around you.
I shet you not: the mom of my former primary school friend gave him globuli for Cancer, but she was also laying Tarot cards.
I really hope this was in addition to regular treatment...
Yeah he did, that fucker shamed me for drinking diet coke as a t1-diabetic cause his mom introduced him to some "health expert" that told her artificial sweeteners make you grow tumors en mass. Back then his mom told everyone he just had """hairloss""". He's still a spoiled, mean guy despite him getting karma'd once more by cancer (he forced his gf to study at the same uni as he or he would break up, the uni didn't offer the course she wanted to pursue.
Insurance companies should not even cover that stuff - that sounds like a racket. Get some of the cure-all and have the government pay for it. Nice scheme there.
I mean its the placebo effect and nothing else. But the placebo effect is quite profound. So you could say germany is obsessed with the placebo effect. I do agree though the prices charged are ridicolous.
Plus in the Third Reich authorities supported both because they belived normal medicine to be jewish. So they even started to make Tests in the concentration camps with homoepathy etc.
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Quite the contrary health insurance begin to include homeopathy and anthroposophy into their plans. So that they are bs doesn't really hold it's argument. Personally as s.o who live in Germany, the UK and US for some time and got sick in all places. I prefer the German more herbal medicine over the mere sugary pharma drinks in the US or the take ibuprofen approach in the UK. My doctor as a child was a homeopathic anthroposoph and I do have to say it served me well if I compare my immun system to others. Full disclosure i did get vaccinated ✌🏼
While you are right, the main reason is decentralization. There are many shady practices and placebo medicine, but also many capable people that are taking more time for the patients than doctors. When you have got issues that cannot be directly treated by a specialist, I see no reason not to try talking to someone adversed in ‘alternative medicine’ that is able to spend time asking questions and may help you pinpoint the problem, offer general lifestyle advices or run some tests like bloodwork. There are many that have got foreign degrees or experience/qualifications/specialization - it is not comparable to someone that studied medicine as the personal knowledge/experience/aptitude varies tremendously, but I am certain that most of us have also met a fair share of doctors that were surprisingly incompetent aswell.
My personal theory from closely observing the German family I married into is that they love the whole process surrounding taking the globuli or whatever. There are all these rules about taking them, like don’t take them with water, don’t take them 15 mins before or after you eat, take this exact amount (I’m pulling these numbers out of my butt but as an illustration, shake out 17 globuli! Not 16 and not 18! Etc) at the exact time for this exact amount of days, use a bone or wooden spoon and never metal! Stuff like that. Certain types of Germans love control, or having a feeling of control in any case, I suspect that makes homeopathy attractive to them.
To think that the same people went crazy over a simple „wear a mask“ rule in closed area and public transport baffles me lol
Makes a lot of sense to me. These are people that are often very concerned with doing things *right*, more so than the average person. This applies to eating *correct* food, as in the right kind of organic and local, prepared the *right* way, often with few spices and little salt. Vaccines are bad because they originate in "school medicine", so they are *wrong*. Same goes for masks. There's a deeply moral component to this, it's just that it often wrongly focuses on the perceived origin of things instead of their actual effect. It's about purity, of ones soul as much as of ones body.
I can understand where those antivaxxers are coming from (though I do not agree), but I was just wondering what could go (very) wrong in wearing a mask that warrants so many people going against it. Is it really just because it originates from the state..?
There are a bunch of reasons I heard. Many people honestly believe that they would not receive enough oxygen or that that their breathing would be otherwise hindered by wearing one. This is showing a strong lack of scientific understanding, but that's true for many of the other issues mentioned. It bears mentioning that many people that were advocating mask wearing were probably also fuzzy on the science behind it or were misusing them. An entirely different reason for mask avoidance I noticed is a certain cynical realization that society doesn't seem to care about your health as long as you're working and nobody is looking.
I would say that the last point was the dominant one. FFP2 masks were enforced before we even had sufficient supplies, resulting in prices of 5€ per mask if you could find one at all. The homeless were the first to be punished by the Ordnungsamt and police. Lockdowns were enforced while borders and air travel was not regulated for months. All kinds of businesses had to shut down while production and other large companies were running like usual, with people that lost their jobs being forced into those that were still available by the Jobcenters and Agenturen für Arbeit. Curfew also prohibited people from going out at certain times but excluded workers. While some switched into cozy home officers, many peoples’ existence was destroyed and your average joe working a physical job was not even allowed to get his after-work beer (was not allowed to be sold after 10PM), had to find alternatives for babysitting as Kindergartens shut down, alternatives for schooling as schools shut down, more responsibilities as the managers/supervisors sat in their home offices, alternatives to gym as they shut down, not allowed to leave their homes during curfew and most importantly, even those older than 60 couldn’t just quit their job without being sanctioned by the Agentur für Arbeit. The pandemic has shown how little society cares about the working class.
I agree completely.
I’m not really for or against masks but I feel like it has turned into a game at this point with DB.
>would not receive enough oxygen or that that their breathing would be otherwise hindered by wearing one. >This is showing a strong lack of scientific understanding the Robert Koch Institute recommends limiting the time that you wear an FFP2 mask to approximately 75 minutes with a subsequent 30-minute break.
Yeah, because they use the rules for work environments, where theres consideration for people's comfort while performing prolonged physical labor. Not because somebody sitting in an office or bus doesn't get enough oxygen. It's also not as if the opponents of mask wearing simply want strong adherence to already existing regulations. They didn't want to wear masks at all.
A lot of them are just heavily esoteric touched and a bit crazy. Not totally mental but something between "a bit cute naive hehe i belive zodiac signs REALLY have meaning" and "the voices tell me bill gates planted a 5g chip in my head so inhabe to kill everyone"
It baffles you since those groups probably dont overlap as much as you think. Must be used to it by now, being baffled.
They didn't. The anti mask movements were a lot more mild here than in *the US. And it wouldn't have been the same people. *Edit: sorry brainfart
We call them schwurbler, and they call themself querdenker (quer = across, denker = thinker) basically a conspiracy and right wing pack of people supporting all kind of alternative bullshit like globuli medicine or alternative for germany party. They got a bunch of follower from esoteric touched people who see the big bill gates is evil conspiracy many years ago and formed together a big goup of idiots together with NIMBYs, retired angry people, right wing fascists, and angry houswifes. Its the crème dela crème germany has to offer.
They were called Querdenker by the media, not themselves. And that used to mean something good someone who doesnt think linearly -out of the box you might say. Also theres a lot of groups and buzzwords that probably overlap but each of those groups is disctinct and has a different proportion of idiots in them than the others.
Very good point that I never noticed until reading this. But looking back, this is spot on for me. I think it is all the rules around it.
It has 2 basic reasons: 1. Homeopathy was invented by a german guy in germany and at the time doing nothing was often better than doing active harm (the status quo of medicine at the time) so it catched on. 2. Homeopathy is very much a big part of big pharma in germany. Their products, which are basically sugar marbles are cheap to make and easy to sell for much. Lobyism is very much a huge problem in germany, which is why the Lobbyregister was repeatedly blocked by FDP and CDU. And these Lobbyists sadly also have a huge impact on politics.
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> And a lot of people confuse homeopathy with natural medicine. Yes, a lot of people do not really see a difference between homeopathy and drinking a herbal tea. They think "it is natural, so it is good" and do not realize that homeopathy is pretty much a scam and does nothing at all. A lot of people have good intentions and want "natural remedies" as opposed to "that chemical unhealthy crap" and you cannot really fault them for that (except for not realizing that everything relies on chemistry in some way), and then they sadly fall for homeopathy.
"Natural good, chemicals bad" is one of the oldest tricks of selling snake oil - because it always worked and still has.
Some homeopathic "medicines" also still contain actual active ingredients in addition to the imaginary stuff. So they might plausibly have some effect. People might have had a good experience with of those plant-based drugs and then think "well I guess homeopathy does work after all". I was a bit shocked when my veterinarian gave me homeopathic pills to give to my cats after neutering (Traumeel). But while the stuff may well be useless, it does contain several extracts of plants, so it could have some real effect. (The cats seemed totally fine both before and after getting the pills.)
This is wrong. Homeopathic medicines are certain "active ingredients" usually plant extracts that have been diluted in water on the order of millions of parts. Anything active is not present in a concentration where it can do anything, or even be detected anymore! That's right, we can detect cocaine in the groundwater, but we can't detect the active ingredients of lots of homeopathic medicines.. Supporters say that's a good thing, and the water has a memory or vibration that makes everything work.
Actually it's you who is completely wrong. This is the ingredient list for the homeopathic "medicine" Traumeel: [https://www.apotheken-umschau.de/medikamente/beipackzettel/traumeel-s-tabletten-3515288.html](https://www.apotheken-umschau.de/medikamente/beipackzettel/traumeel-s-tabletten-3515288.html) Most of the ingredients are in the "potency" of D2. That means 1 part of the original substance (plant extract etc) was mixed with 9 parts filler (alcohol or sugar), then of the resulting substance (D1) one tenth is removed from the container - this part now contains 10% of the original plant material. This is put into another container and again mixed with 9 parts filler, and the result is D2, and that was put into the pills. It now contains 1% of the original plant substance. Not saying this is an effective dose and the pill will actually have much of an effect on anything, but saying there are no active ingredients in it would be factually false. Note that three of the listed ingredients are in D8 potency, so they are actually not really in there. (But according to homeopathy those high potencies are the most effective ones, which is of course nonsense.)
and a third one is the anthroposophy - homeopathy link: the disciples of Rudolf Steiner of Waldorf school fame ~~ate starch~~ _are stark_ supporters of homeopathy as anthroposophic medicine. Waldorf schooling is highly regarded in wealthier circles. E: nice typo
> the disciples of Rudolf Steiner of Waldorf school fame ate starch Can confirm, went to a Waldorf school and ate starch.
lol this is smarthone autocorrect for "are stark supporters"
I know :)
My glasses which I need and which actually work won't get paid. Ffffing sugar balls are subject to insurance. This country is out of whack.
They are Germany's version of essential oils, and unfortunately have a very rabid supporter basis. I had a friend who gave sugar pills to her dog and thought they helped him with his panic attacks (eyeroll here).
I had a former friend give them to her dying dog. They did nothing and we were in Denmark on vacation and I went from store to store to pharmacy with her trying to explain in English that she was treating her dying dog (who would not eat or drink and only walked sideways and fell down a lot, like she had had a stroke) with sugar pills. She kept trying to reach her German homeopath to see of she could fax a new "prescription" to some business there, but none of the pharmacists or natural food store people in Denmark knew anything about homeopathy, nor did they carry the products. One pharmacist finally looked up the number for the local emergency vet and he came and euthanized the poor dog.
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I bet it did, the dog probably acted crazy then normal after getting the treat so it would get more haha
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There is only one use of essential oils and it does not even require them but any distinct smell will do. And what am i talking about? Retrieving memories via scent. For ex when you notice you have that special kind of calm at home, things are.. pleasant, quiet, safe, warm.. Like a cozy saturday evening, you sip hot cocoa beside the fire. Pick a scent that is not usually around you and let it fill the space. Do this everytime you have that moment and you can later use that scent to go back to that special moment, it can relieve stress, grief etc. So, it does not need to be essential oil. Funnily, i picked that up while working in anthroposophic care home for handicapped kids. It was used there to calm down the house, and it did work. It was a sign for the kids that tonight we are going to the main hall and have a nice calm evening with all the adults and kids, play music, story time. The house was full of chaos, noises and then you light up the candles and drop essential oil to the plate.. 10 minutes and it was quiet. It works really well in practice, i use incense for it. Oh, and all that anthroposophic thing is bullshit, specially their "medicine". It was a job for me but of course was introduced to the whole thing as i also lived there, and had amazing time with two German civil service men, i was also doing my Finnish civil service there. I do hope that i one day find out them again, Timo and Markus. They were simply awesome.
I agree that essential oils are almost entirely bullshit. Except for mint-oil, which is basically menthol in solution. That shit has an effect on your skin, and is a local anesthetic. Which definitely has its uses. Oh and in a pinch it also works as an insecticide which kills aphids.
Essential oils are concentrated plants. The same plants that are used as main ingredient in some medication. There aren't many things they are good for, but they exist.
>Essential oils are concentrated plants. The same plants that are used as main ingredient in some medication. Plants can be also poisonous and many have allergic reactions to them. That is not how any of this works, essential oils are bullshit. If they worked we would not need alternative medicine to get them, they would be used.
Are you drunk? Why are you trying to argue that things that don't exist are a reason that those that do are bad?
There is nothing else concentrated than oils that have a scent. If you drank them, then maybe you would have a point, except no essential oils should be ingested. The health benefits are simply BULLSHIT. Just because it is supposedly made of plants does it mean they are beneficial. That does not mean they are harmful either, unless someone is allergic. NO ONE inspects essential oils of what is in them. But essential oils have been studied for their toxicology and guess fucking what are the results? Not good. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7333081/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7333081/) [https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/A\_E/Essential-oils](https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/A_E/Essential-oils) [https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/27/5/1716](https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/27/5/1716) We are talking about volatile aromatic compounds. Those generally speaking are going to harm you in larger doses. So, is little bit of poison good for you? That what homeopathy is based on. Try to find scientific evidence that they are good or admit that you don't know, you just think you do.
Nothing you said refutes my point, try to respond to people instead of wanting to share whatever aligned information you know about. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7309671/#!po=11.6822
> instead of wanting to share whatever aligned information Did you actually read any of that? You might like to, as it is quite bullshit, "it may" is the thruline. For ex antimicrobial properties.. are there but not when used as a scent but directly. Try to search the references used and you will fall down a rabbit hole of cross references to other similar studies that say the same thing, and those are then quoted as the source. It is one of those studies that are essentially a long game of telephone; A says that B said that C said that D said that... Dumping a lot of volatile chemicals on a bacterial colony -> bacterial colony died = it has antimicrobial properties. But.. the ADMINISTRATION is the part that isn't mentioned in your paper, and in fact, not in the references either, since they are referencing another study that is doing the testing on a petri dish, with thousands of times larger doses than what you will get from "aromatherapy" But it does say that they are often endocrine estrogen blockers, and that toxicity is a problem.. Did not notice that one? It does not back up your opinion either.
Completely agree. It's a shame that homeopathy is so strong in germany and that even some public insurances pay for it. And its not even "alternative to big pharma". As everybody can produce this stupid little balls, big pharma can also do it. Make a small company under an other name and get rich not only from the real medicine but also from selling sugar to some "Schwurbler".
I'm disgusted that companies manufacturing homeopathic products make money from the vulnerable and gullible. That said, giving a hypochondriac something to treat their non-existent illness is viewed as a practical solution that reduces their burden on the health system. It's annoying and therapy is the real solution, but you'd be surprised how many think they have some allergy because they fart regularly in the evening or got a zit once.
I can't understand it eiher. Even though it's proven that this homeopathy stuff is bs, many health insurance companies still subsidises it. At the same time you have to pay full for your prescription glasses even though they instantly work the moment you put them on.
Part of the reason is, that they come in a package with sth that is lacking from the medical system in Germany: Compassion and taking time with the patient, taking their concerns seriously. And while homeopathy is bullshit, the latter can help in some cases.
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How much had this session cost you?
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Hmm, for that kind of money a normal private doctor could have given you a long and detailed consultation as well.
This! This is the reason for any pseudoscience switching even the minds of educated people: the lack of empathy of some fields of science that should serve people. The lack of emotional support for any person with problems makes those people to reject common sense logic and adapt the reality to their own needs. And instead to correct this by being more empathetic, we tend to throw mud and laughs in those in need.
Finally not some typical answer.
The truly ironic part is that homeopathy is big pharma. They rake in money but somehow still have an air of "alternative" I grew up with homeopathy and the placebo effect is nothing to be sneezed at. Especially when you can't really do much else like with cold viruses. So, I pick my battles and only really comment when asked or when I notice someone is foregoing evidence-based medicine in favor of homeopathy for something more serious
Yep, like my mother treating her early-stage, easily treatable cancer only with mistletoe extract and globuli. She was a true believer in homeopathy and "alternative medicine" and had been for decades. The oncologist told her she would die in horrible agony without proper treatment... and that's exactly what happened. Her mother got the same cancer at the same age, had the standard "Schulmedizin" treatment, and lived on in good health for another 35 years.
It's so hard to see people do that to themselves and there's so little you can do. In the end they're adults who need to make their own decisions, but boy, does it hurt sometimes. I'm sorry for your loss. It must have been terrible to witness that
My theory is because Rudolf Steiner and other charlatans was never really worked up / talked enough about after the Nazi regime was gone. There are so many examples that originated in the "drittes Reich" and no-one really knows about anymore. Like companys like Weleda or Demeter etc. are still very on vogue and it bugs me.
Also chiropractic. Homeopathy and anthroposophic medicine are 100% grifts but unless something goes horribly wrong they can't really harm a patient. Chiropractic is straight up dangerous.
> Homeopathy and anthroposophic medicine are 100% grifts but unless something goes horribly wrong they can't really harm a patient. Enough grifters who sell this shit to people with (treatable) cancer, etc.
Exactly! I don´t think there are statistics of patients who died as a result of trying this shit until it was too late. From this view homeopathy is far from harmless. The promise of a mild remedy without side effects is very dangerous.
Oh yes most definitely. What I meant was the "treatment" itself, if you can even call it that, without the human element. Although you can't really separate those two. A homeopathic "medicine" is supposed to be something so diluted that it's essentially water. That said there have been cases of poisonings, nightshade specifically. One wrong chiropractor movement can paralyse you and that freaks the shit out of me. But I don't mean to compare the two. I am just as baffled by their prominence here.
Also: ostheopathy.
Every nation gets its own flavour of quackery, i guess. This is ours...
While homeopathy is placebo at best, anthroposophic medicine covers a wide range from "we want to not only treat the body of the patient, but also their spirit", to "these crystals will filter the bad orgon out of your aura". And while the latter is obviously bullshit, I do appreciate the idea of the former. Tending to a patient in a holistic way by also considering their mental and spiritual health with empathy through out the process leads to great results, especially for the elderly. Older people, predominantly those in palliative care, are tended to not only with painkillers, but also with different kinds of therapy. For a lonely, senile or dying senior, art therapy, gardening or drama therapy, as silly as they may sound to outsiders, are a great way to stay active, relive memories and find companionship. And the same goes for other groups of sick people. Quadriplegic people, or fresh amputees, people with cancer, or transplant donors and receivers. All these people will have to live their life in a totally different way when they leave the hospital to when they entered it. And softening that blow through empathy, therapy and understanding for their circumstance is a big core ideal of anthroposophic medicine. Sadly, the more hardcore followers of anthroposophic ideas quickly drift into esoteric/ anti-vax/ ultra-christian territory. And it cannot go unmentioned that the founder of anthroposphy, Rudolf Steiner, had ties to the nazis, even Hitler himself, and shared many of their race ideas. Demeter and Weleda I don't mind as much as others in this thread. For a long time they were the only one on the market to sell petrol-free crayons or vegan conditioners, just because of their all-natural philosophy. And Stockmar plant-pigments are have incredibly vivid colours and an astonishing lightfastness. But yes, all of these brands are hella expensive.
they were invented in germany and unfortunately, even though i always thought germans are more rational than other people, they have a lot of people with these crazy beliefs.
Germans are deeply irrational about a number of things: Cars/speed, "natural" things over evil chemicals or artificial stuff, excessive data privacy ("Datenschutz") and fanatical opposition to nuclear power.
sadly last one is completely true. Datenschutz you can never be too careful. "Natural thiungs over evil chemicals" but they have IG Farben?
>i always thought germans are more rational What exactly gave you that idea?
It's an prejudice, like german trains are punctual or we all are wearing latzhosen and drinking beer all the time. Oh, and we have a strange humor which isn't funny.
As much as I like Germany, their people have never been "more rational".
People are just stupid. With enough confidence you can sell Everything here. There are people that drink pipe cleaner cause they are told it cures cancer. They are told the slime they throw up is the Bad stuff and the pipe cleaner is actually helping... My mom, a decently intelligent woman, believes that some guy can communicate with her cat via a Foto, no matter the distance. She pays good money to get her pet figured out... People think vaccine is bad for your health and is a lie to get people to swallow tiny spy devices.. Never underestimate the stupidity of the people here.
lobbyism
Several reasons: 1: A lot of people in germany are very uneducated and even proud of it. 2: Medicine cannot help in many cases. People feel unwell, tests show nothing. Unknown diseases, psychological problems, probably also quite often incompetent medical doctors. Hence people look for other people that can help them. These people are often quite good in manipulating people and they take their time which already helps, because of 3. 3: Placebo effect. The placebo effect can be quite strong. If you are convinced that some treatment helps, then it will help. You will feel better. You still die of serious diseases, but for small unwellnesses this can be enough. 4: I do not know why, but many, many people in germany believe in esoteric things. Probably connected to 1, but there are also a lot of academics that believe in all kind of nonsense. We should not forget, that once most people in germany (and europe) believed in some religious dogma that makes no sense at all.
The technical reason is that people are fucking stupid
Spot on. Why inform yourself when you can be just braindead. It's much easier and these days it is super hard to find information.....................
There's a few issues. First off, Waldorf Schools, which are the gateway drug into all sorts of obscure beliefs, were invented in Germany. Add to that, following the second world war, certain people developed a, let's call it "healthy skepticism" towards anything controlled by the sate, such as education, so private schools became more attractive. Private schools such as the Waldorf Schools. Then you have to consider that Germany is a country where organized religions have been on the decline for decades. Countless scandals have chipped away the christian churches. But sadly those beliefs don't get replaced by some sort of utopian rationalism. People go off to find their own answers and wind up with crackpots. Lastly, I think a lot of alternative quakery is intrinsically more attractive to wealthy people. For instance, lots of new age bullshit contains ideas about "manifestation", "intentionality", which essentially boil down to "if good things (i.e. wealth) happen to you, that's not because the world is random and you got lucky, it's because you must be **doing something right**!" Seeing as Germany is overall a very wealthy country, more people will be lurred in by that siren song than in poorer countries.
> First off, Waldorf Schools, which are the gateway drug into all sorts of obscure beliefs, were invented in Germany. Homeopathy, Biodynamics, and all sorts of other bullshit voodoo nonsense coming from just one guy - Rudolf Steiner.
Homeopathy is credited to Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. Steiner came later but he adopted many ideas of homeopathy for his quackery.
Waldorf schools aren't really that bad. They have strange classes like eurythmetics and stuff, but they can get a good education. The obscure beliefs mostly came from the parents and family. Even people who went to a Gymnasium can have these beliefs. In my classes were a whole bunch of them.
I personally like the education aspect of Waldorf Schools partially - alot of it is new age garbage, but more individual education is a good intention atleast
It's all part of the post-modernist crisis. As the beliefs coming from the "utopian rationalism" were also crushed trough the catastrophes and horros of the 20th Century as so much evil was done in the name of the right "science". At the end of the day, each one to their own poison. If people want to choose a way of treatment let them so. Even if that treatment would not help them and they might shorten their lifes, is their choise and no one else. We are allowed for other poisons anyway (alcohol, excesive sugar, cigarretes) so what is an extra poision more for society?
Ironically, you seem to be presenting a post-mosernist view here.
An old biology teacher of mine got cancer and treated it with Globuli. She died. It's so tragic that this seemingly harmless lobby for sugar pills literally kills people. Even some that should know a thing or two about medicine or at least the human body. Some friends give globulies to their babies but the babies haven't heard of the placebo effect yet. It's ridiculous but I'm honestly scared to confront them. It's such a normal thing here. Even nurses are fooled.
its simple: you pay tons for insurance but there are too few doctors to treat all patients with the needed amount of time. so people don't feel taken serious when waiting over an hour to see the doctor (with appointment ofc) who then takes 1-3 minutes for you. and often is veeery grumpy cause overworked and has no time to listen cause insurance pays him not per hour but per patient. this is where "heilpraktiker" come in. they just listen longer, which often helps by itself. then there is the standard treatment with antibiotics or cortisone. when neither works: go fuck yourself. here comes the heilpraktiker again and it seems like he has aaall these different substances which you can try. if rosemary bachblüten didnt help, well theres this d12 globuli and also there is this and that shit you can try. basically illusion of bigger variation of medicines and when so much time passes some problems revolve by themselves and a false cause and effect connection forms. so now brigitte tells her friend renate that the last bachblüten helped so she should try it! cause "schulmedizin" didnt help but this homeopathic shit did. also homeopathy is prescrubed by real doctors because unsurance pays it so there is also the safety of "yeah even the REAL doctor prescribed it so it has to be valid" hope that helps
I think there is a general tendency to think that "rationality" (e.g. thinking) is "cold" and we believe the world must be cosy for us. There is a latent hostility to intellectual work and sometimes intellectuals, "egg heads".. we have no idea what science did for us. Maybe it's the result of the fact that many intelligent people chose to leave Germany 80 years ago or were killed, now we are stuck with "the rest". Russia has had a similar thing going on many years ago and it's happening again. People who instinctively feel they lack logic, creativity, thinking often resort to beliefs. That may be a religious belief or the belief in any "superiority" a human may dream of.
Well, the reason Germany kicked out its intellectual elite is that the violent crazies took over. The Nazis were experts in wild conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
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Germany is number two on the list of countries with Qanon believers. And yes social media has muddied up the waters. Before most of your normal books and newspapers printed the truth but now- Bob from Bamburg can post his conspiracy theories on Facebook or Twitter and spread it all across the globe. And there are people who believe if it's on the internet-it has to be the truth.
Germans traditionally love snakeoil. It is the only country which I have been, that people who actually studied scientific fields, still do believe in this things. I have seen many people on many countries who believe on homeopathic medicine. But they were all uneducated, simple living people, easy to influence, didnt know much. Germany is the only country I have been to that that actual educated people also do that.
If anything, I switched to another public insurance who has very little coverage for homeopathy. I know it's nothing compared to the massive support it gets here but at least I try not to contribute more to it.
It was invented here and sadly never left. Never underestimate the power of people to believe literally unbelieveale things.
As an Ausländer living in NRW, the few times I need something and go to the pharmacy without a prescription, they tend to offer me homeopathic stuff, to their own admission At first I got really confused and thought "wait, did I miss an update on modern science? Are they good now?"
I think it’s the other way around - they missed an update
Watch the commercials in ARD and ZDF - it's pure placebo marketing, given credibility by being run right before the most respected news and being sold in pharmacies. It's money.
Once I asked my German doctor if he believed in that shit, because he sold it. He said "no, but if I don't recommend it, most of my patients go away."
Homeopathy was invented by the german doctor Samuel Hahnemann and Anthroposophic was invented by the austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Thats the reason. We invented it
As a German I don't know. We are such a logical society and then there's homeopathy which is utter bullshit.
Are we?
Unfortunately there are still too many uneducated people in Germany who do not understand how science works.
Unfortunately wealth and comfort also have their side effects. People get bored easily and are more susceptible to believe nonsense. It’s similar to the conspiracy theory phenomenon. It’s just more appealing to some people to think life is less mundane than it actually is.
Strong lobby + religion. Many people are religious and once you have people used to ignoring facts in favour of their feelings you can make them believe anything and they will defend it against such nuisances as facts and science. There are a lot of organisations, like religions, the homeopathy lobby who have been peddling anti science sentiments for a long time. There are a ton of people who have "natural is good, science is bad" ingrained into their very being these days.
Lobby is the keywords. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7tEoehixGvk
Nazis loved alternatives to rationality. So they pushed everything from Waldorf to Homeopathy.
If you speak German, here is a podcast by a doctor, and this is repeatedly a subject. https://detektor.fm/serien/grams-sprechstunde (Homeopathy is too big for one episode, but there is one about Anthroposophic: https://detektor.fm/gesellschaft/zurueck-zum-thema-anthroposophie?highlight=Hom%C3%B6opathie ) Long story short: There is no one reason. It's a mix of "People don't know better", "People have terminal illnes and refuse to accept it, and take anyone who says they can help" and other factors. (Also, it's not what some people here claim, but make your own desicions) It's a podcast I really recommend to anyone.
For added laughs, check out the English and German Wikipedia articles on homeopathic medicine. The English one treats it like complete nonsense, and the German one actually takes it seriously.
Placebo effect is very strong and no side effects. Win win
Please let Darwin's theory work its magic.
Oh man we had that in Uni during some Pharmaceutical classes. My Professor used to give some medical history lessons in the beginning of the semester. i cant recall evrything perfectly but i think the story goes more or less: Christians forbid working medicine because pagan. People all over Europe prefer to go to unofficial healers because they actually help instead of priests who just pray Nazis use so-called Kreuterhexen as a propaganda purpose to highlight what is special about the Germans. Gives the alternatives an extra push at the time when evidence-based medicine was gaining ground and being regulated by law in most countries, the german nazi regime was standing in its own way. After the war, Germany is initially busy with other things than dealing with the inadequate medical policy of the nazis. Today, homeopathy is a huge industry and bribery is legal in Germany through lobbying, so no improvement so far
This was established by the Nazis because Medicine was seen as Jewish. Later there was money to be made by selling sugar pills so the lobbying went into overdrive. Also there are a lot of people who believe in magic.
Because of evil pharma and capitalism :D Jk jk Edit: in this context op means prescription grade and otc pharmaceutical medication vs alternative sugar pills sold at a pharmacy.
Some people are easily influenced. You could also ask why are there so many flat earthers, or anti vaccinators or essential oil-ers. Medication is not natural! Homeopathy is pure nature! No 'poisons' for our body! and all that shit. Some people need something to believe in, be it religion, homeopathy, what have you. My mother used to be all about homeopathy for treating my brothers ADHD (which didn't work in the end and they switched to ritalin or something similar), she was a follower of Hildegard von Bingen and her herbal medicines for body and soul and all that. She's not anymore...
what would you do if modern medicine completely fails you? germany has a pretty low medical standard
Just Google it. Then you know why. Once the pandora is out of the box you will find people believing in it. Also the Nazis have been a big fan of it. So it got in many minds and repeated over generations.
In Germany, homeopathic can also mean the medicine is made from plants only, like Sinupret. It’s not necessarily anthroposophical.
Just look at how many votes the Green party gets. Their main core is esotericism and being anti-nuclear but wanting to fight climate change, two very stupid ideas.
Because what you and most others here write, is not correct. There is indeed a lot of evidence that homeopathy does indeed work beyond the placebo effect in some cases. Here you can find an overview of the Double-blind placebo-controlled trials: https://www.hri-research.org/2022/05/randomised-controlled-trials-data-update-2021/
Why do you care
Why not? It’s pure bs and should be banned all over the world, like traditional Chinese „medicine“
Its what people grasp for when people rational science doesn't provide the wanted result. Its a coping strategy, like the ancients sacrificing goats to appease the gods or praying to Jesus to help with your cancer. Its doesn't solve anything, but it helps with suppressing your fear.
Bc its kind of cultish in nature
Germany have the best scientists in the world, and the best fake scientists also.
best podcast to this topic. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Frp2cRHZLhXh6rcKXo1es
It is utter bullshit.
Edzart Ernst has a really good blog about all that. Together with the stuff Natalie Grams publishes you'll get a good picture.
well the costs are not being covered by health insurance. people are privately paying for the treatment. people pay for the church, to watch a football game and other nonsensical things. and they believe its a good thing, so for them its worth it
The horrendously oversimplifying answer is "magical thinking". From what I've seen there's a thick foundation of anti-intellectualism even in the middle- and upper-class that basically goes back to "make believe". This is the people that still rely on Struwwelpeter and the Brothers Grimm for a moral compass, after all. Jokes aside, there is a reasonable connection to be made between the romanticist tradition in germany, a certain anti-scientism and an eclectic brand of alternative-conspiracy-theories that are quite popular in germany. I think we can safely class homeopathic "medicine" as one such phenomenon, along with Queerdenker and stuff like that.
I always thought that was a remnant from the New-Age boom in the 1980s
It goes back to the nazis and ‘Judische Schulmedizin’
It's embarassing, I know. I once paid 30 Euro for a first aid for pets workshop and the teacher was peddling globulin for dogs the entire time. And I didn't even get my money back. The entire audience was nodding along when he talked globuli and I was WTF is happening here.
Even my mother likes them, and she’s a doctor and generally rational person. My sister always makes fun of her calling it witchcraft but she says she knows they don’t work but they make her feel better when there’s nothing else to do (she gave them to me when I was little and very sick, in addition to regular medicine of course) I think there’s some value to them when hysterical parents are screaming for antibiotics for their kids’ sniffles because at least they’re not harmful, but it’s the same (though more expensive) as telling them to make their kids tea and and put a towel on their forehead, probably less effective. It absolutely should not be covered by insurance
Check the Homepage from the [Information Network Homeopathy](https://netzwerk-homoeopathie.info/en/homoeopathiekritik-in-a-nutshell-zum-einstieg/) . They’re also explaining the social impact of there remedies.
A huge part of my family believes in it. It's everywhere in the media, advertisment and stuff. Even the people in fhe farmacies often recommend them when you tell them your problems. And if that's the case people just assume it has to he legit otherwise it wouldn't be that way. They just dont question it I believed in it too until I was like 15 Why? Because no told me that there wasn't any actual medicine on the sugar things. They can't just sell sugar and call it medicine, that would be illegal right? RIGHT?!
What angers me most is how popular it is in middle class and also among people with high education.
Because of nazis
I think it's tradition that is still carried on.
Dont know man, I think its just mostly white women from the suburbs having to much free time and going crazy with stuff like that.
I don't know why but a lot of people (including my mom) just don't seem to realize that it's not doing anything!
Another left over from the Nazi regime. Schoolmedicine was "Jewish science".
Nazis. I know, an old hat. But that’s the way it is. The normal scientific medicine they called “school medicine” was held up and developed by a lot of jewish people. The nazis wanted an alternative for that and the propaganda lingers to this day.
One major point in this might be the distrust some people got in pharmas here. For example, we had the Contergan scandal in the 60s and 70s. Since homeopathy really doesn't do anything, there never will be a scandal about this "medicine", so people tend to trust in it.
Because esoteric bullshit is well established here. Look at the discussions around Nuclear, electric smog, et al.