There's no medical basis. There's no real basis in Ayurveda or AOM, either. It's f'ing disgusting. That said, as soon as we came down to LA my wife started encapsulating placentas. We've made roughly $8k doing it. We've prepared the placentas of some of the most famous starlets in Hollywood. This is not something poor people do. (before you ask, we steam them in a rice cooker with lemon and ginger out on the deck, then slice them into super-thin slices, then bake them for 14 hours at low temp to drive off all moisture, then grind them up and encapsulate, all in dedicated never-used-for-anything-else hardware) The reasoning: somebody is going to make money doing this. Might as well be us. But yes. It takes a special kind of batshit to eat your placenta. Here, let me show you what kind of batshit it takes: http://nymag.com/news/features/placenta-2011-8/ Both of my cousins ate their placentas. Both of them barbecued them. But then, both of them are amongst the craziest bitches I know. For true nightmare fuel, look up "placenta butter."