Don’t Take Medical Advice From the New York Times Magazine

I didn't interpret his post as containing any magical thinking or handwaving, per se. Rather, I think's saying that there are interactions and compounds in drugs we use that we don't (yet) fully understand. Where you and he differ is that he advocates the use of compounds that seem to work, but whose mechanism of action we don't fully comprehend -- whereas you appear to take a more cautious view of said compounds.

Personally speaking, I sort of fall in between your two positions. There are a lot of treatments in modern medicine that are effective, but whose precise workings science does not fully comprehend. I support the use of these treatments, so long as longitudinal data shows them to be safe and effective, and their benefits to outweigh their drawbacks. However, I don't support remaining ignorant about them -- I believe we should keep striving to fully understand what's going on underneath the hood, so to speak.

"Meh. Alcohol gets you drunk. The main difference in effects you'll see between different types of alcohol is how concentrated it is, how fast you drink it and how much you take down. Drunk is drunk one way or another."

The same quantity of alcohol does, indeed, have different effects on different people. This is correlated with gender, body weight, the liver's ability to metabolize the alcohol, individual neurochemistry, etc. There is a panoply of systems within the body that react to the presence of something like alcohol, and that differs from person to person.

In a macro sense, yes, alcohol gets everyone drunk. But the rate at which it does so, and the quantity needed, and the long-term damage, can be quite variable.

"We do, what we don't need to embrace is stuff that hasn't been shown to work, contains all sorts of stuff in all sorts of unknown quantities."

Agreed. We may be living in a golden age of snake oil. The unregulated supplement industry is enormous and growing. Much of the unproven stuff is useless, some of it is dangerous, and more of it will probably be shown to be dangerous in future studies.

Why is fear justified? Isn't the appropriate response reason and critical thinking? FDA approved drugs have been extensively field tested as well. And many "dangerous" chemicals are actually safer than, say, wine.

You're just trying to justify your fear of the unfamiliar. It's parochial and small-minded. Do you think that the people who discovered tea, beer, tomatoes, and cheese thought that way? Imagine how much smaller and less interesting our lives would be today if these sorts of fears had gripped our ancestors, and how much smaller our future will be if we allow them free reign today.

But I agree that if you don't use these characters, setting it up to type one or two odd characters isn't worth the hassle.

Chemophobia is about nothing more than familiarity. What we are familiar with we accept and are comfortable with, what we are unfamiliar with we are more likely to be afraid of. News organizations play this up all the time, because playing on fear of the unusual is an easy way to gain ratings (especially in a modern world where anything unusual that happens anywhere on Earth can be fodder for a local news broadcast).

For example, imagine you hear a story of someone having died in an arson fire, the news will probably have little impact on you, you may not even feel anything other than a small degree of sadness. Now imagine that you hear another news story, except this one is about how someone tampered with someone else's toothpaste and snuck in eggs of a parasite which then hatched and grew in the victim's intestines for a day and eventually led to the death of the victim. You'd almost certainly pay attention to that story, and you'd probably have strong feelings about it too. And you'd also likely feel a little wary whenever you brushed your teeth or bought toothpaste. You'd almost certainly never feel wary or in fear of arson while living in your apartment though, and you probably wouldn't think about how horrible dying from fire could be. However, in the US the risk of dying from arson is far, far higher than dying from intestinal worms. However, in some parts of the world the latter would be far more common and familiar.

Just because something is common and familiar doesn't mean it's safe, and the inverse is true as well.

I certainly advocate the use of things for which there is evidence that they work, even if we have no idea how. I'm just very cautious about hailing these things without investigation, or elevating the natural above the artificial (whatever that means) because of some vague belief in plant synergy.

I like the aspirin example here - aspirin can be produced from salicin in willow bark. Willow bark itself can be used in much the same way, but contains tannins that can damage liver and kidneys over time.

So I think we absolutely should use and investigate 'natural' remedies that seem to work, but we should never assume that they're better or that we can't do better.