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Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

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Re: Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

#51
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its stupid they did that, but then I do remember widespread use of "Tromol" in Moscow. People would take it in high doses and veg out for days at a time.

Is this is the same Tramadol that is incredibly addictive and kills people if they taper off too quickly? Why wouldn't you want some hoops for this? I was prescribed it after I broke a leg in judo. I was shocked when I looked it up and found forums rife with addicts in great distress.

Hoops are good, yes, and I don't disagree with the decision to reclassify it. The extra time and expense of new doctor appointments, urine tests, pill counting, questioning, etc. for someone who has been on the drug responsibly for a long time can just be aggravating.

Re: Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

#52
I give my aging lab Tramadol. It is easier on his liver than other painkillers. Vets routinely proscribe Tremadol as a painkiller to animals after surgery, as it's not hard on their organs.

But that doesn't mean you should take it. Stick to beer.

Re: Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. "Organic" is pretty widely abused, too - want to drink some crude oil? It's organic...

Crude oil is [primarily] organic if your context is [petro]chemistry. It's not an organic foodstuff however. Shock, horror, words have contexts which cause them to mean different things. Why is it that you don't wish people to know where their food has come from and how it has been produced. What is the problem with that for you? If you don't care that your children's food is saturated with growth hormones, fungicide…

I'm not the parent (I'm GP), but my position is that organic certification is good, but the universal association of "natural = good, synthetic = bad" is only harmful.

Yes, farmers pump animals full of chemicals and this should be documented and, if you are concerned about this, it's a good thing that there are organic food certs out there. However, whole industries fuelled by bullshit have sprung up off the back of this very common fallacy. There are people out there who don't take scientifically-proven medicine because it's "not natural" and lean towards quackery like homeopathy, and this is what I'm opposed to.

To reiterate, IMO organic or free-range farm produce is a good thing and I'm sure most people would agree with that. That's not what I was talking about so don't get rude with people based on a misinterpretation of the subject, it's unnecessarily disruptive.

Re: Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural products chemistry is a very old branch of synthetic organic chemistry. See wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_product If you do a quick search for Natural Products in Google Scholar, and you'll see that this is a widely accepted term in organic chemistry. Now, what you're saying is something that generally irritates me to no end - differentiating between "synthetic" and "natural". An alk…

In fact I’d half-expect that synthetic products be generally safer, since you know exactly what you’re making and the extent to which it may be adulterated. If I want to eat everything that comes from the vanilla bean, I can buy extract. But if I want just vanillin, I can buy exactly that.

Natural products can be produced via a wholly synthetic method, they're just compounds which are also produced by non-human bits of nature.

Re: Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

#55

>The farmers apparently take the drug themselves, at pretty high dosages, saying that it allows them to work without getting tiree. That's insane. Tramadol is among the worst painkillers to use recreationally, which is why it's often the next line of analgesic therapy after NSAIDs and before hydrocodone. It is a comparatively weak mu-opioid agonist, so the dose a person would have to take to get a prototypical opioid…

Presumably they are getting the drug from supplies meant for the cattle. It's not like they have a choice of drugs to use.

Re: Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

#56
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

more importantly, the use of "natural" to describe a product with the implication that it being synthetic would be a bad thing is a fallacy.

Exactly, cyanobacteria are also natural as is tobacco. One can synthesize many natural products in purer and safer forms.

Cigarettes are very far from just dried tobacco leaves, as they've been engineered to maximize addiction with additives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_in_cigarettes

http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/opinions_la...

Re: Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this is the same Tramadol that is incredibly addictive and kills people if they taper off too quickly? Why wouldn't you want some hoops for this? I was prescribed it after I broke a leg in judo. I was shocked when I looked it up and found forums rife with addicts in great distress.

Hoops are good, yes, and I don't disagree with the decision to reclassify it. The extra time and expense of new doctor appointments, urine tests, pill counting, questioning, etc. for someone who has been on the drug responsibly for a long time can just be aggravating.

That does sound a bit much. In the UK we'd expect free healthcare and doctor's appointment for re-ups.

Re: Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

#58
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laboratory tests are expensive and time consuming and in this case completely unnecessary. Why would anyone do such an experiment?

Good point - as I said, I am not a scientist, so that's what I wanted to know and your answer helps me understand. In my mind, it seems like declaring that a plant is growing gold, without testing the ground (or doing a lab test), and later finding out that its roots are picking up the gold from a seam near the surface.

At some point you have to stop. For examples: what was the geological reason for the gold seam? What is the transport mechanism from the roots to the rest of the plant? What is the evolutionary advantage to grow gold? What are the genetic differences between that plant and similar plants?

It's impossible to cover everything, so you have to get an idea of what's interesting enough to publish.

Then when you do submit it for publication, the reviewers will say "have you tried X?", where X is something which takes a lot more time and funding than you have, and you really just want to be done with the paper.

Re: Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

#59
post #2

Wait, let me make sure I am understanding this. So Tramadol was given to cattle in such large amounts that it made it into the soil and enough got soaked up by trees that it was thought that Tramadol came from those trees. That is just incredible.

Exacerbated by the animals seeking shade near the trees and then relieving themselves in the shade.

Re: Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

#60
post #2

Wait, let me make sure I am understanding this. So Tramadol was given to cattle in such large amounts that it made it into the soil and enough got soaked up by trees that it was thought that Tramadol came from those trees. That is just incredible.

It's the circle of life!

I only wish we could get a wikipedia-news-citation cycle in on this story.
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