You can participate in a research homeopathy study at UJ

On the notice board at my vet I saw an invitation to participate in a research study conducted by the homeopathy department at UJ. If you have a cat allergy you can participate, free of charge, in a study of the efficacy of a homeopathic treatment. For more info contact Erin Du Plessis 0823124529.

I briefly contemplated participating, coincidently I am allergic to cats, to see how well they conduct the study, but then concluded I’m not really that interested.

Only if they pay me. I’m broke. On the other hand, I’m not allergic to cats, but that is of no consequence really considering its homeopathy.

Maybe if they give you enough water medicine, you too can be allergic.

damn. and there i read homosexuality study… got excited for nothing.

Here’s the ad, note they are diluting cat saliva, like cures like.

http://a3.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/391851_10151040846450397_853145396_21872015_1917778084_n.jpg

This belongs in “I lol’d”. Because I’m still chuckling.

“Get your cat saliva! FREE of charge to all cat allergy sufferers!”. My word.

cat saliva is pre-requirement in my house. if you don’t come with your own, my cats make sure you leave with some.

Disturbing thought… who milked the cat for saliva and how? Where is that cat/s now? I’m going to get all Greenpeacy and demand to see the cats and whether they have been treated humanely in this process.

I coincidently found this article on how to homeopathically treat your sick fish and therefor the conclusion is if you show a cat a fish it will drool. If it drools in the fish tank then the fish will have no problems with allergies.

Ah, OK. I thought they were going to put one cat in a roomful of a billion dogs to see whether or not that would cure you.

What I want to know is why the blazing hell South African universities have such things as departments of homeopathy and chiropractic and theology etc. Considering that all of this is heavily subsidized by taxpayers’ money. It makes a mockery of the very concept of a university or degree.

Mostly, it’s tradition: They’ve offered this stuff since forever. To a lesser degree (;D), it’s the not-so-savoury consequence of turning education into a business: Give the people what they want — at a fair price. The trouble of course (;D) is that it’s a vicious circle: Universities nurture the respectability of this stuff by offering such courses, which ensures that people will continue to want them.

How does one pull the plug on this? I really don’t know other than to say that it’s not likely to succeed if done suddenly when that is exactly what’s needed. It’s quite a quandary.

'Luthon64

It is a huge problem as you are giving students almost useless degrees. I met someone who had been studying chiropractory for years, it is really hard, and not very helpful nor effective to point out that it is mostly bunk at that point. I wonder if you could sue a university if you could prove they knowingly offered and endorsed a fraudulent course? Probably not, maybe a campaign of publicly shaming university officials, or aim it at students before they enrol. :confused:

It is noteworthy how often scientific breakthroughs were made by people who had to fight the academics all the way. Universities do serve as the protectors of tradition and carriers of the flame of knowledge. But they can all too often also simply become the endorsers of hackneyed traditions, and a protection racket for pseudoscience.

Part of the problem here is that much of conventional medical research has fallen into pseudoscience, consisting of little more than utterly naive and meaningless correlation studies. It has become difficult to point fingers at the homeopath when you can’t necessarily even trust your own GP anymore either. It seems as if one university department after the other gets taken over by postmodernists and pseudoscientists.

Anyway, I also know a girl, an extremely nice and quite intelligent person, who is working her head off to become a chiropractitioner (ha! spell-check keeps on wanting to change “chiropractitioner” to “misappropriation.”) I haven’t the heart to tell her what I think. It won’t help either, because after the financial and emotional investment she has now made in it, I doubt very much whether she’ll let go of it. In the meantime, I am entering the field of education; in order to do so I have no choice but to complete a post-grad diploma in education, another pointless “qualification” the worth of which has never been demonstrated.

It seems the world has become obsessed with paper “qualifications.” Before long you won’t be able to get a job as street sweeper without first qualifying yourself as public transportation sanitary engineer or some crap like that. All that formal study costs an absolute fortune, and increasingly teaches you preciously little - it is beginning to look ever more like a government-sanctioned scam, if you ask me.

Agreed, but degrees offered in Afrikaans is the same to a certain extent - I studied with people who completed their degree in Afrikaans and who struggle terribly to find work because they don’t know the appropriate terminology etc. in the international arena. Obtaining a University qualification and being able to use it are two different things. :confused:

By “degree in Afrikaans,” do you mean a degree with Afrikaans as major subject, or a degree done through the medium of Afrikaans?

Afrikaans as academic language seems to be quite a contentious issue at the moment, with lots of Afrikaners bitterly complaining about the anglification of Afrikaans universities like US and UP. It seems to me silly, for precisely the reason you point out. No researcher in his right mind would dream of publishing his research papers in any other language than English, because if he does, who the hell will read them? He could discover a warp drive or a cure for AIDS, and nobody would notice.

Now I do wonder what the medium of instruction is in European countries like Germany or Sweden? Does anyone know? Whatever it is, German and Swedish scientists surely have no choice but to learn English.

We should be grateful: in another few decades it’s going to be Mandarin… :slight_smile: