Does anyone else use gems?

If herbal healing of this sort was useful, there would be a major for it in well-rounded colleges and unis. Why aren't tarots or gems taught at Harvard, which has an over 1-billion dollar endowment and departments for every established discipline known to man, and some new and kinda questionable ones, such as women's studies and black studies? I seriously doubt that after all these thousands of years, no serious scientific research has been done to test the usefulness of tarots, palm readings, crystal balls, gems runes, and "herbal healing" such as in this "college of herbal healing."

Keep in mind that I agree with your overall statements. But your faith in the science department of American Universities is flawed. As an undergrad doing research, the only type of studies that get widely published and promoted are those that are able to obtain enough grant money from companies and organizations that find it a worthy cause. Thus research is often narrow in certain fields making it stifling for professors to gain the necessary funds to run invigorating tests on their field of interest.

I worked in a plant research facility this past summer and I was working with a professor in developing a genetic variant of a strawberry plant that would yield more crops. Strawberries grow along lines called runners. And they only grow along every-other node. Which means that around 1/2-2/3 of the length of the plant is not used to produce strawberries. My professor was attempting to find the gene that controls such growth factors and manipulate it so that it would grow more frequently. We didn't have a lot of things we needed in order to proceed due to the project not nearly being as popular as the other research project being run in the adjacent room.

The adjacent room was a study on how to turn switch grass into a viable fuel alternative. Switch grass can frankly grow like wildfire and if the research is successful, may provide drastic results to alternative fuel sources. The amount of funding going into that project was at least 9999999999999999999x more than anything we had to work with and it showed with the type of complex machinery they used in order to regulate the crops and splice the DNA. We literally had to beg and grovel in order to use some of their unused equipment that was a bit dated.

When financial support is provided, it is often off the basis that the research sounds plausibly realistic and will bring about great benefit. What this stifles however is the chance for something plausibly unrealistic to bring about great benefit or the simple fact of purely learning more about an unstudied field that could in the future perhaps lead to a great benefit due to a disaster and catastrophe drastically changing the environment and requiring the use of previously disregarded research to alleviate the issue. It's all touch and go.