It amazes me how susceptible people are to quack medicine. While present-day medicine is by no means perfect, it is still massively more dependendable than many "folk" solutions. This isn't to say that naturopathy is not effective. It is to say, though, that a medical doctor is more authoritative on medical matters than some random hippie.
Indeed, if you start ignoring medical science you could end up like this woman spent who massive amounts of time and money so she could obtain her placenta.
A woman has won a court fight to keep the placenta after her daughter's birth. She had planned to grind it up and ingest it as a way to fight postpartum depression, but now plans to bury it...Mother Wins Fight to Retrieve Placenta
Swanson, who was 30 when she gave birth, originally wanted to give her placenta to a friend to be dried, ground into a powder and packed into capsules. She said she now plans to dry, store and eventually bury the organ instead of eating it.
"I hope this brings about a better awareness about the benefits of placenta," she said, citing a theory that placental hormones can help control postpartum blues.
Here I must disagree with SFGate's use of the word "theory". A theory is a reputable explanation for natural seen phenomena. I have yet to hear from a respected medical doctor who believes ingesting placenta will relieve women of post-partem depression.
Actually, I think this mother is acting quite irresponsibly. Placenta, as the article notes, is "human biohazardous waste". That means getting her friend to ingest her placenta is probably the wrong thing to do.
In the woman's defense, she has decided to bury it. Still, no credence should be given to this quackery. The fact that she sought to use this court case as a means to "raise awareness" of her silly ideas only proves she's learned nothing.
To this, I say if she really wants to make a case for placenta-ingesting, and it really is so important that she'll make noise in the courts, maybe she should spend her time at medical school and write a peer-reviewed doctoral thesis on it. That is unlikely, though.
