More Funky "Science?"

I don't know where Bayou Renaissance Man gets this stuff, but I'm grateful, er, I think.


I'm grateful because it demonstrates in very shocking and graphic ways the kind of thing I've talked about in other posts regarding logic and reason.  I don't want to copy and paste all of that stuff here, so assuming you've read it now, let me deal with the pertinent parts.

"It is believed the bacteria increases levels of serotonin, reduces anxiety and may also stimulate growth in certain neurons in the brain."

Really?  You believe that because . . . ?  Wow.  There is so much of this kind of nonsense going on in the so-called scientific community these days.  Take a little bit of data and extrapolate to all kinds of bizarre conclusions.  Never mind doing actual controlled experiments, isolating and controlling the variables to determine if your theory is valid or falsifiable.

This is how we get fantastic hoaxes like anthropogenic global warming.  You see, somebody is going to read that, and then when they tell somebody at work or their friends or their family, they are going to leave out the crucial "It is believed . . . " part.  Some will use their God-given common sense to dismiss it until some solid research comes along, but others will just swallow it wholesale and repeat it to others.  The only reason that it won't be pushed through the use of advertising and further press releases is that there is no way to patent dirt and make money off of it.  At least not yet.

Maybe the USDA or the FDA, under the provisions in S 510 will figure out a way to harass the public if they catch anybody letting their kids make mud pies.  


Then there is the second part of BRM's post regarding the Swedish woman:

"After having been administered the enema of her husband's bacteria-free faecal matter, the woman made an rapid recovery and immediately began to regain some of the 27 kilogrammes in weight she had lost over the previous eight months."

Do I deny that the technique worked? No.  Do I understand why it worked? Yes.  But for crying out loud, why do we need to resort to such methods when there are perfectly good, natural nutritional ways of dealing with such a thing?  First you could have had her take copious amounts of spicy food with large amounts of capsaicin to kill the bad bacteria, and then naturally fermented raw cabbage or other such vegetables to restore her own healthy digestive tract.  But no, let's do something uncomfortably invasive that might have resulted in a very bad reaction with her immune system.  And by the way, how do we know that it hasn't happened already?


To be fair, maybe they had tried the food route already and her case was so special or severe that it wasn't producing results fast enough.  Perhaps the heavy antibiotics had so destroyed her good bacteria cultures that there wasn't enough there to regenerate quickly enough.  I just hope that I've learned enough and made enough changes to my own diet to never have to need an enema with somebody else's feces.


Now, go forth and eat better, and try to forget about this story for the rest of the day.