New Age rubbish on portuguese TV
Friday, September 1st, 2006Well… after some episodes of Penn&Teller, I feel tempted to swear in great, great amounts.
Some minutes ago, while watching one of the most seen TV shows in Portugal, “Portugal no Coração”, broadcasted by RTP, the public channel, I felt tempted to drive 50 Km to Gaia, enter the studios, and start yelling “This is crap! Can’t you f*cking realize this is solid crap?”
Well, the reason for such an enraged desire resides in the interview, conducted by the two beautiful and gentle female presenters, to the long-known pseudoscience advocate, Alexandra Solnado, daughter of the famous portuguese comediant Raul Solnado (poor guy). Alexandra defends that she is able to perform hypnotherapy sessions which transport people to their past lives… well, that would be enough to make me angry, but Alexandra decided to take it further, exposing her pseudotheology about human soul, body and behavior. According to Solnado, hyperactive children are a product of an experience in one of their past lives… she says medication is the worst thing you can provide them, and all they need is some of her “therapy” sessions. Well… that would be a perfectly harmless (yet stupid) claim, if she wasn’t being broadcasted to… let’s see… 10 000 000 portuguese citizens, plus 5 000 000 portuguese citizens living outside the country, and people living in portuguese-speaking african countries! I expected that our cute TV show presenters would at least ask her for scientific base for her affirmations, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Instead of taking it as her opinion, they even managed to give her credibility, by agreeing with her, and placing her questions which denoted some previous knowledge on the matter. Well, after the pedophilia scandal, now we find ou that our television channels are being run by narrow-minded new age fans.
Alexandra Solnado even claimed that, in the USA, scientists had found out that the new generation of children is born with a cerebral cortex that is different from the previous generations’. Well… I bet my cerebral cortex is different from hers… (thanks God) but I’d like to know more about such a study.
I immediately wrote a mail to the show’s official address, which I transcribe below (roughly translated into English, too).