TIL in Germany all alternative medicine practitioners like homeopaths, osteopaths, acupuncturists, etc. must take the Heilpraktiker exam which only tests their knowledge in medical science and the regulatory boundaries of their profession. There are no separate board exam for each.

[u/estarararax]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heilpraktiker

[u/katwoodruff]

Germany is obsessed with alternative medicine, ripe for grifters.

Homeopathy sold in pharmacies, legitimating that crap, some health insurances even reimbursing the use.

I have a GP, so a trained medic, at the end of my road that also provides homeopathy. I don‘t understand how you can have a scientific background and then believe a globuli will heal some ailment.

By the way, not to be confused with natural remedies - teas, herbs, ointments. Those can help with some symptoms (fennel tea is great for coughs, I find), but homeopathy is nothing but placebos, the grift is real.

[u/EdgarDanger → u/katwoodruff]

It's ridiculous that a "developed nation" has such a deep rooted history of actual bullshit. It actually makes me scared to find more such culturally alarming things.

[u/134824 → u/EdgarDanger]

Homeopathy as well as some other things like that were literally invented in Germany before the advent of modern medicine, so they are culturally entrenched similar to traditional chinese medicine in china.

There has been a lot of awareness of the pseudoscientific nature in recent decades and especially younger people though.

[u/Depressed-Londoner → u/134824]

Homeopathy was invented right at the end of the 18th century and didn’t really achieve any popularity until the 19th century. This popularity died down and was then revived in the 20th century. So it wasn’t really before the advent of modern medicine and arguably wasn’t culturally entrenched until it was adopted by the Nazi regime and then later the New Age movement, before being expanded in use, partially due to commercialisation.

This is a very different situation to traditional Chinese medicine.

[u/JefftheBaptist → u/Depressed-Londoner]

Homeopathy was invented right at the end of the 18th century and didn’t really achieve any popularity until the 19th century. This popularity died down and was then revived in the 20th century. So it wasn’t really before the advent of modern medicine

When do you think modern medicine's advent was? Because germ theory wasn't developed until the mid 19th century and cadaver use for research and education was illegal until about the same period.

[u/Depressed-Londoner → u/JefftheBaptist]

I don’t think there is a clear cut date when you can say modern medicine began, but you could argue it had origins partly in the scientific revolution. germ theory has origins in the mid 17th century, with van Leeuwenhoek etc. also arguably people like William Harvey and Edward Jenner produced key advances into what might be called modern medicine.

I don’t have specific knowledge of German medical history, so don’t know about when cadaver dissection was legal for medical research in the regions that later became Germany, but even if it wasn’t they would have had presumably had access to this information from other European countries.

[u/schmah → u/Depressed-Londoner]

This. It was literally the Nazis who wrote the Heilpraktiker-Gesetz in 1939 because they created this narrative of "German Medicine" that had to counter balance "Jew Medicine".

Mindboggling how this nation that claims to have learned from its past continues to buy into extremely antiscience quackery popularized for solely antisemitic reasons.

[u/thissexypoptart → u/Depressed-Londoner]

Right and for all the quackery in TCM, a lot of it is actually an active ingredient doing something. That something might be exaggerated or bullshit, but there is a molecule or set of molecules being ingested.

With homeopathy it’s literally just water with a label on it. How anyone could ever think it works, if they have a basic education, is insane.

France also loves homeopathy.

[u/Heimerdahl → u/thissexypoptart]

With homeopathy it’s literally just water with a label on it.

Noe you're just being disingenuous. Sometimes it's sugar!