Woman Wins Right to Eat Her Placenta

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...

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.

Mother Wins Fight to Retrieve Placenta

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.

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Millions of Years Ago, Astronauts Roamed the Earth

There comes many a time when you hear an idea so completely ridiculous, that your brain breaks. The belief that part man/part animal astronauts walked around our fair earth is one of them. The ancient astronaut "theory" mocks the very concept of "theory". Hell, it even mocks the concept of "hypothesis" — hypotheses deserve consideration.

For the moment, I would like you to bare with me as I take you on a tour of the thought process behind this "theory".

AAs first came to Earth many millennia ago. They were beings whose biology was similar to modern humans. They created modern mankind by mixing their genetic makeup with that of sub-humans. The purpose of mankind was to serve the AAs, principally by providing food and mining and construction labor. The AAs did not allow humans to view them – only their symbols (idols), suggesting that their appearance was frightening; however humans were occasionally permitted to see their emissaries, e.g. "geniuses" and "angels". They also would not allow humans near them, except priests who had cleansed and covered themselves and spread a germicide, suggesting their susceptibility to earthly diseases. They apparently moved about the Earth in spacecraft using chemical fuel, and only landed on mountaintops or other rocky outcroppings; this reduced the dust and provided physical protection from humans, and disease control.

World Mysteries - The Ancient Astronauts Theory, an article by William Saylor

So why the need to make up such quackery? Perhaps its the inability to accept things at face value. A person who is never satisfied with the world in front of him sometimes has to visualize how he would like the world to be.

Another reason may be impatience. Unsatisfied with the fact that there are some things we just may never know, the person who made up this story decided to make up answers. It matters little that it is far-fetched, just that it is an answer.

To that, I say sometimes your heart may be more at peace by accepting the concept of mystery into your life: that the unknowable and therefore the unanswerable can be a good thing.

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