In Germany you go into jail for drug trafficking if you try to enter Germany with more than your personal supply of homeopathic sugar balls
Off topic, but… surely that means you can to jail for taking ANYTHING edible into Germany, since the less it contains, the more powerful it is. So if I take say a bar of chocolate into Germany, it is infinitely powerful with respect to all known and unknown homeopathic medications.
Sounds like an excellent reason to avoid Germany,
Airborne_Again wrote:
E.g. it was claimed that medical insurance in Germany generally will pay for homeopatic treatments.
There are various ways health insurances cover complementary medicine, to which homeopathy belongs together with TCM and others.
The general health insurance (prescribed by law) does by default not cover complementary medicine unless it is prescribed by a doctor as part of a conventional treatment. E.g. my wife has had Acupuncture prescribed as a part of treatment and it was covered.
In order to get a larger cover for complementary medicine, there are additional insurance you can take out for it. Then it is covered, almost by the by. Of all the complementary medicines it is by far the cheapest.
Quite a few docs use homeopatic medicine in support for conventional medicine. Myself the only time I’ve seen a real measurable effect which can’t be put down to placebo effect, was when our doc gave us a small bottle of “Osanit” to help our kid when she was teething, after we had tried a lot of other (considerably more expensive) conventional stuff to no avail. I only later learnt Osanit was homeopatic, but the effect was instantaneous, 100% reproducible and lasting. Since, I have head similar experiences from several friends with small kids.
A doc I’ve known for many years uses homeopathy to help people who have psychosomatic illnesses. He has found that for people like that, the effects are as good as conventional medicine is, but without the side effects and possibly lasting damage some of those have when taken over a long time.
Where I think it may be critical is if people try to self-medicate themselves and do not seek the help of a doc because they fully trust that kind of treatment. People who get training in homeopathy and other similar therapeutic professions are made well aware of this and are held responsible if they do not refer such people into care immediately.
Silvaire wrote:
Beyond 2022, if the European path forward includes the concept that life in that part of the world will require booster shots every 9 months and showing periodically expiring vaccine passes to enter restaurants, stores etc for the foreseeable future, I believe my choice will be to stay away from Europe indefinitely until the CV phenomenon fades away naturally, both medically and politically, or that there’s a popular revolution against any such nonsense.
Sadly my approach will be the same, substituting European Union for Europe in that paragraph. I will not pay for a test under any circumstances, so it looks like very little international travel for me in the near-term future.
The UK is on a knife-edge with this stuff. Vaccine passes have just been introduced for nightclubs and ‘large events’ as a result of omicron, but they don’t dare touch pubs, restaurants, shops etc. We are fortunate to have around 100 Conservative MPs of a libertarian persuasion who just rebelled strongly on the omicron measures vote, and with Johnson’s government embattled with allegations of sleeze and corruption, as well as breaking their own Covid rules last year, he is in a very precarious position and will not dare to upset his own back benches again. The Guardian, and to some extent the BBC, attempts to portray these rebel Conservative MPs as rightwing nutjobs.
Today I had an email asking me to book my booster jab and have booked it for the 22nd. I’ll get this one, but I’m not getting one every 6-9 months for the rest of my life and accepting it as normal, so there will be a point where I stop bothering. No doubt in the minds of many this will make me an ‘anti-vaxxer’.
Graham wrote:
but I’m not getting one every 6-9 months for the rest of my life and accepting it as normal
Ever since it has become clear that vaccinations, while hugely successful in reducing severe illness, are only around half as effective in preventing spread, you won’t have to. Instead, you (and pretty much everyone else) will be infected with the real thing periodically. This will naturally keep immunity levels up across the population.
That is the mechanism which prevents us from dying from any of the endemic viruses, such as the literally dozens of cold viruses in circulation.
Cobalt wrote:
Instead, you (and pretty much everyone else) will be infected with the real thing periodically. This will naturally keep immunity levels up across the population.
I understand that.
However there are now enormous economic incentives to keep governments and populations in an endless variant/booster cycle. I’m not enough of a conspiracy theorist to say that this was planned, but I’m enough of a ‘realist theorist’ to see that this is all very profitable for a lot of people with vested interests and they won’t want to let go of it.
johnh wrote:
Off topic, but… surely that means you can to jail for taking ANYTHING edible into Germany, since the less it contains, the more powerful it is. So if I take say a bar of chocolate into Germany, it is infinitely powerful with respect to all known and unknown homeopathic medications.
Only if you have slammed the chocolate bar into a table to “potentiate” it.
@Graham, the motivation for an endless variant/booster cycle is not just money, it’s power and the latter is a far more powerful incentive to politicians because it sends them money forever.
There is a segment of the population, varying in size by country and culture, that clings to authoritarian government as a way to cope with fear even when it’s fairly clear that the limited and inflexible government approach being taken is ineffective, obsolete, and/or not valid when viewed in relation to benefit. This is fundamentally no different than the authoritarian unions of government and religion in centuries past. Nowadays government has learned to use ‘science’ as an element in its religious style authoritarianism, even when it doesn’t fully understand the science and hasn’t got a justifiably effective technology based on that science. I think that will be the eventual undoing of this latest phase, because eventually more and more average people will figure out that in reality ‘science’ is not actually what it’s being sold as being.
I don’t have a problem with anybody who sees a single authority religion as a solution in their lives, except when their ‘solution’ unduly affects me and my solution. I’m surely not alone in this and in due course I think the 21st century trend of ‘government and science as an ideological religious-style phenomenon’ will eventually find its limits in marketability.
Silvaire wrote:
I don’t think it’s two doses of vaccine that are ineffective, it’s that the efficacy of the most recent dose is time limited to an uncertain degree, no?
Rather clearly IMO. It’s like the last dose only lasts for 3-6 months with any efficiency to speak of. And this is not only against omicron, it’s also valid the previous variants, like delta. The only special thing about omicron seems to be it’s more infectious, and probably less dangerous. According to good old Darwin it will therefore take over, which is what people working with diseases have said from the beginning. Covid will eventually evolve into a flu like disease, highly contagious, but less dangerous.
“According to good old Darwin it will therefore take over, which is what people working with diseases have said from the beginning. Covid will eventually evolve into a flu like disease, highly contagious, but less dangerous”.
I hope you are right but is there good evidence apart from Darwinism that that is the case or is that wishful thinking?
LeSving wrote:
. It’s like the last dose only lasts for 3-6 months with any efficiency to speak of
@LeSving, where do you get the data for these BS assertions from?
This is from a recent study of Pfizer effectiveness
The top graph is effectiveness against infection, and the bottom against hospital admission.
It is a shame that there appears to be no Darwinian mechanism that makes misinformation die out…
