91–100 of 127 posts
Here's the thing, if you're taking medical advice from someone who isn't a practising doctor, you're probably an idiot. All those natural herbs and old wives tale remedies? Scientists actually have checked those and turned them into actual medicines where they worked. Everything else is a load of crap.
"We are a chemophobic culture." I take great issue with this statement. We are most decidedly not a chemophobic culture. People are more than willing to take medicines that are artificially synthesized and, as the author mentions, with good reason. I, for one, am not chemophobic. I personally know an individual who developed one of the first total-syntheses (i.e. "artificial" chemical synthesis) of a very important a…
1) You say that the bias the mainstream medical establishment is a bigger travesty than chemophobia. This is not an unreasonable hypothesis but if we're going to compare them we need to have some idea of their size or import. This strikes me as requiring some rigorous study so I am skeptical of any estimates without some sort of backing. More importantly to me, why is it one or the other? Maybe they are both problems.
2) When combining chemicals the effects may certainly be different than when taken separately, but is the difference always beneficial?
"The hope, then, is that when taking something more "natural" as opposed to man-made is that that natural product will inherently contain a wider variety of compounds that taken together create a more potent, but gentle effect on the patient."
I think this is optimistic.
3) "... so many people have taken natural products for hundreds of years without ill-effect ..." How do you know they have taken them without ill-effect? Even with rigorous clinical studies and modern statistical methods this can be difficult. I'm not saying no useful knowledge has been gleaned this way, but I would think that it would obtained much less efficiently. It's only the sheer length of time that has resulted in some useful outcomes.
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I like to think of it this way - It's strange how the last hundred years in the west have seen the greatest expansion in both length and quality of life isn't it, while at the same time we all have to deal with these 'chemical toxins' that people decry. Maybe they aren't poison, and just maybe we've all benefited from the rise of synthetic medicine (amongst other things).
This is incredibly simplistic. The last 100 years has seen the expansion of the car industry as well, I guess there must be some relation to out quality of life as well. Even though cars are responsible for over 100,000 deaths a year.
I'll re-pose my initial point as a question to see if it comes across as less simplistic - If humans haven't evolved to tolerate synthesised chemicals in the last 100 years, but our atmosphere, food and medicine is full of them, why are we living longer than ever?
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> if it was homeopathic, we can be quite certain that it was doing nothing at all. From TFA: >several recent peer-reviewed studies have shown that at least one of the active drugs in four-marvels powder, quercetin, exhibits anti-inflammatory activity. Dismissing all traditional treatments without using research is just as woo-ey as blindly accepting them.
Whoops. I misread 'naturopath' as 'homeopath'. When you dilute something 10e60-fold, I'm comfortable dismissing it, and it's not woo-ey at all. But that wasn't the case here. I didn't mean to imply that traditional treatments can't contain active ingredients that can be useful -- they surely can, and are the source of many drugs.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/01/28/you-cant-have-n...
> the NPLEX (Naturopathic Physicians Licensing Examinations), which is required for naturopaths to be licensed in the 16 states in the U.S. and 5 provinces in Canada that license naturopathic physicians tests naturopaths on homeopathy
> Then there’s the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP). If you take a look at its blog and search it for the word “homeopathy, you’ll rapidly see that the largest “professional” organization of naturopaths not only embraces homeopathy but defends it against attacks.
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Paracetamol (acetaminophen) is a very safe drug if you do not take too much. Being in pain when there is a simple, cheap, safe, effective medication is a bad way to live.
The problem I have with it is that it lowers the bodies natural ways of dealing with pain. You become more reliant on it, rather than just handling the pain yourself. This works for non extreme pain, of course.
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It's hard to for many at least in the United States to use é or other words with explicit accent symbols due to the way our keyboards are set up. I have mine modded to use shortcut keys to make them, but that's more than what most would ever want to deal with.
As a European using the extended latin alphabet, setting your keyboard up to easily type é, is easy: use a modifier key. Then, for example, MOD + ' followed by e becomes é. Similarly you can make à, ô, ĩ, œ, ů, and so on. I even believe this is the default setting (as I cannot remember setting it manually). But I agree that if you don't use these characters, setting it up to type one or two odd characters isn't worth…
In the same breath you should also not assume any doctor is an impartial scientist. Doctors are humans and are therefore also subject to being lazy, greedy, ignorant, etc. Just because they seem to have more knowledge and use something of a scientific method doesn't mean they aren't locked into their ways, always giving the same kind of diagnosis for certain symptoms without questioning their limited knowledge. They…
"Another common chemical name for methotrexate is amethopterin, which comes from the roots meth, Greek for wine, which I might stretch to spirits, and pterin, Greek for feathers." Except for it's ameth, which would mean lack of intoxication, a la 'amethyst'. In fact the whole article is complete BS as it doesn't even remotely align with the views the author presents in the original article -- nowhere does the author…
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"Magical thinking detected." 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 cautio…
> Rather, I think's saying that there are interactions and compounds in drugs we use that we don't (yet) fully understand. Unless there is evidence to support that position, that's indistinguishable from magical thinking rephrased to sound scientific.
Magical thinking is the belief that there is some fundamentally unknowable-to-man mystique underlying the workings of drugs. That's not what anyone's saying is the case here. Rather, they're saying that certain drugs work, and that the reasons are potentially knowable to science, but in many cases may not be known yet. (Or fully known yet).
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"Magical thinking detected." 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 cautio…
"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." 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 natur…
No argument here, or at least not from me.