Homeopathy and Jehovah's Witnesses.

by jojorabbit 15 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  jojorabbit

  Years ago, the JWs did not like modern medicine. Vaccines and other things were all deemed bad. This gave rise to a lot of JWs getting into alternative medicines. Homeopathy was one, and when the hippie new age people started up a lot of JWs were old hippies and went to the granola way of medicine. Both are BS although some of the herb can be somewhat useful but not all that much. Homeopathy is total BS.

  I know of several JW families who were deep into this as if it were some wonder medicine. My wife and I were given a box of Homeopathy medicine [sugar pills] as a wedding gift. I did not know much about it at the time and it was before the internet so information was not near as easy to find. I did find some books on the subject and found it really was insane. The more a medicine herb is diluted the stronger it is. We used to say if I don't take any will I OD?

  I was told things like "the queen of England uses Homeopathy." Well that was an appeal to authority. James Randi used to take a whole bottle of Homeopathy sleeping pills in his talks on the subject. He said Don't worry, I have done this many many times and its just sugar pills.

  Many of the JWs I knew were as invested into this garbage as they were in the religion. At first it sounded like it may be something to this. But as I pulled back the wool it did not take much to see it was nothing but BS. I don't think that the JWs in general are as anti modern medicine as they were in the 60s and 70s. Am I wrong? Do they still go for this stupid type of thing or is it not near as big of a thing as it was back them.
  
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  Simon

  I remember people talking about this and it wasn't in a dismissive way, it was the same crazy belief that they gave the WTS claims.

  It's clearly fraud, and yet the government allows it. But then if they started to clamp down on health-related fraud there would be a lot more industry and revenue being shut off.

  This is still an excellent sketch:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
  
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  slimboyfat

  Famous Swiss homeopath Alfred Vogel, said to have been a JW, was very popular among JWs from German speaking countries

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Vogel
  
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  fulltimestudent

  Vogel was certainly a witness. He once spent several weeks staying with a JW family I knew in Tahiti. He used to walk around the island (so they told me) picking leaves off trees and telling them what it was good for. It is my understanding (that apart from his bread, once well-known in Australia) his products were a mix of homepathic medicines and herbal medicines. They were, as SBF remarked, extremely popular in Germany, as this Bloomberg news item discusses.

  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-12/homeopathy-doesn-t-work-so-why-do-so-many-germans-believe-in-it#:~:text=Roughly%20half%20of%20Germany's%20population,re%20satisfied%20with%20the%20treatment.

  The above article also points out that homeopathy is also popular in India, where it is seen as akin to traditional ayurvedic medicine.

  To understand the popularity of homeopathy we need to appreciate that it came into use in a time when orthodox medicine was not very advanced either.

  But I do appreciate that its popularity in the JW org, is just a minor bit of evidence that the HS did not tell the the FDS that it was going to be superseded by evidence-based scientific medicine.

  
  

  And as for Alfie Vogel, he did, I understand, finish his life disfellowshipped
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  road to nowhere

  I use it some, and it seems to I work. Wife, a few friends too. It may be psychological.

  It I s true about the fringe society. I grew up thinking only witnesses ate health food. Before hippies, beatniks
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  fulano

  Vogel was very populair among the dutch JW. In fact all of my family had “De kleine dokter” written by A.Vogel in their theocratic library.

  The only books they ever had, the Watchtower shit and Vogel, the lunatics.
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  truth_b_known

  This was huge when I was growing up as a JW. My father thought health insurance was a waste of money. Snake oil and a chiropractor were all you need according to my parents.
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  Lost in the fog

  The late Jan de Vries who was a UK protege of Dr Vogel said in an interview that Vogel's wife had been a Bible Student and later a Jehovah's Witness, but Dr Vogel was not. That's what he said.

  I know a lot of people in my former cong who embraced homeopathy and wouldn't go to a general practitioner.

  But as well as Vogel's medicines quite a number were taking Dr Bach's Flower Remedies until an elder who was into personal research (which also probably explains why he's no longer a JW) discovered that Dr Bach was a spiritualist who asked the spirits to identify which flowers went with which illness, and admitted that he never actually went near the flowers himself.

  Lots of sisters were in a panic after he said it in a public talk one Sunday morning because they all swore by the stuff and had told everyone including their Bible student's to use it. I think they all rushed home from the meeting to bin their collection, and probably got the elders round to exorcise their houses in case of demonic entities hiding in their medicine cabinets in the bathroom. Lol.
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  road to nowhere

  The weirdest ones are the aura readers and the eye readers.

  JWs alone cannot be t h e support for this industry.
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  surprised2bhere

  Bioreasonance seems to be latest fad I've heard about. Expensive but can diagnose and cure anything - apparently. I wonder if JWs are so busy checking treatments aren't demonic they forget to check anything else. To be fair it's their personal choices. As long as they don't badger other people not going. As if.