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

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

#21

Post by [deleted] »

robotresearcher wrote: post #16
ars wrote: post #7

addlepate: Your account has been banned, and almost no one can see your posts. To reply to you: I challenge you to define "chemical" in the way you are attempting to redefine it. People want to use it to describe unsafe or non-natural compounds, but a little bit of thinking will quickly show that that definition is impossible. Use chemical as an adjective instead of a noun and you will do much better. Used as a noun…

Some non-chemical things: Justice, beauty, truth, prime numbers, O(log n) insertion time of a binary tree, Beethoven's 5th. Just for the record.

[deleted]

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

#22

Post by firefoxman1 »

tokenadult wrote: post #8

From the article: "We are a chemophobic culture. Chemical has become a synonym for something artificial, adulterated, hazardous, or toxic. Chemicals are bad—for you, for your children, for the environment. But whatever chemophobics would like to think, there is no avoiding chemicals, no way to create chemical-free zones. Absolutely everything is made of atoms and molecules; it’s all chemistry." This was striking to m…

Never heard the term "chemophobic" before, but now that I think about it I have some chemophobic friends. Their argument is always something like this:

"Humans evolved consuming only organic material from their very beginnings up until about 100 years ago. Humans just haven't evolved to tolerate synthesised chemicals in a mere 100 years."

(that's obviously paraphrased but you get the point) But when it's said like that, I tend to agree with them. When they're called "chemophobic" in articles like this, I tend not to agree with them. I've no clue which to agree with.

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

#23

Post by short_circut »

nikatwork wrote: post #20
aheilbut wrote: post #19

This is true, but totally misses the point of the NYT Magazine article. The 'four marvels' powder was mentioned only in passing. [edited to remove my dig at homeopathy, which wasn't at issue here - it was naturopathy] The more interesting thesis of the original article is that some inflammatory disease is related to a 'leaky gut' syndrome and that it could be modulated by diet and changing gut flora. Unfortunately th…

> 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.

Actually if it was homeopathic we really can be certain that it would do nothing at all. Maybe the person you were responding to didn't quite state it clearly. I don't believe either that commenter or the article refereed to it as a homeopathic remedy.

I won't get into why a homeopathic remedy can't work. It should be pretty obvious just based on what homeopathy claims

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

#24

Post by aheilbut »

nikatwork wrote: post #20
aheilbut wrote: post #19

This is true, but totally misses the point of the NYT Magazine article. The 'four marvels' powder was mentioned only in passing. [edited to remove my dig at homeopathy, which wasn't at issue here - it was naturopathy] The more interesting thesis of the original article is that some inflammatory disease is related to a 'leaky gut' syndrome and that it could be modulated by diet and changing gut flora. Unfortunately th…

> 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.

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

#25

Post by lizzard »

So many people earnestly want to tell me how if I just drink the right cherry juice, or do acupuncture, I will magically be fixed. It is very annoying. Rather than take someone's anecdotes and try them one after another it seems more sensible to look over the last 20 years or so of research papers and decide on treatment based on that.

Also, 6 weeks on methotrexate is not a very long trial.

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

#26

Post by ars »

robotresearcher wrote: post #16
ars wrote: post #7

addlepate: Your account has been banned, and almost no one can see your posts. To reply to you: I challenge you to define "chemical" in the way you are attempting to redefine it. People want to use it to describe unsafe or non-natural compounds, but a little bit of thinking will quickly show that that definition is impossible. Use chemical as an adjective instead of a noun and you will do much better. Used as a noun…

Some non-chemical things: Justice, beauty, truth, prime numbers, O(log n) insertion time of a binary tree, Beethoven's 5th. Just for the record.

Those aren't things, they are concepts.

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

#27

Post by dools »

When Meadows’ husband has serious reservations about her desire to ditch the advice of not one, but two, pediatric rheumatologists, Meadows implies he was the poorly informed one: “I was nervous about keeping Shepherd on methotrexate, but Darin didn’t share my squeamishness. He has always been more comfortable with pharmaceuticals, more trusting in general.”

If you read the original article, you'll see that she didn't "ditch" the advice. She kept giving her son the prescribed medication. She discussed "Walker's Regimen" with Dr. Kahn who approved it in conjunction with methotrexate. Dr. Immundo gave her the number of a complementary practitioner.

The parents agreed that they would wait 6 weeks without increasing the dosage. They did that, their kid got better.

Seems like a perfectly sensible course of action to me. I think even though Michelle M. Francl (author of the OP) touts her self as a "scientist" her article is just as influenced by emotion as the original article she's referencing.

The only valid point she makes is that Susannah Meadows refers to the use of "four-miracles powder" as a "drug free" solution. Cool, that's inaccurate and pointing out that chemicals in "magically named" complementary medicines are just chemicals the same as any other is a valuable discussion to have.

But she allows a really derisive and dismissive attitude to creep into her writing which has no place in scientific discourse.

I realise that Meadows' article is just as emotive, but at no point does she try and take the intellectual high ground.

TL;DR: we sought advice from everyone, tried everything, and our son got better as a result. Win.

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

#28

Post by aheilbut »

tokenadult wrote: post #8

From the article: "We are a chemophobic culture. Chemical has become a synonym for something artificial, adulterated, hazardous, or toxic. Chemicals are bad—for you, for your children, for the environment. But whatever chemophobics would like to think, there is no avoiding chemicals, no way to create chemical-free zones. Absolutely everything is made of atoms and molecules; it’s all chemistry." This was striking to m…

Skepticism towards synthetic chemicals is quite justified given a century of irresponsible dumping of genuinely toxic chemicals which still goes on in many parts of the world.

Be rational about risks and benefits of chemistry and pharmaceuticals, but do worry about it.

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

#29

Post by rdtsc »

lizzard wrote: post #25

So many people earnestly want to tell me how if I just drink the right cherry juice, or do acupuncture, I will magically be fixed. It is very annoying. Rather than take someone's anecdotes and try them one after another it seems more sensible to look over the last 20 years or so of research papers and decide on treatment based on that. Also, 6 weeks on methotrexate is not a very long trial.

You could do worse than just not get "fixed". You could be harmed. Natural and safe are fairly independent concepts.

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

#30

Post by e2e8 »

firefoxman1 wrote: post #22
tokenadult wrote: post #8

From the article: "We are a chemophobic culture. Chemical has become a synonym for something artificial, adulterated, hazardous, or toxic. Chemicals are bad—for you, for your children, for the environment. But whatever chemophobics would like to think, there is no avoiding chemicals, no way to create chemical-free zones. Absolutely everything is made of atoms and molecules; it’s all chemistry." This was striking to m…

Never heard the term "chemophobic" before, but now that I think about it I have some chemophobic friends. Their argument is always something like this: "Humans evolved consuming only organic material from their very beginnings up until about 100 years ago. Humans just haven't evolved to tolerate synthesised chemicals in a mere 100 years." (that's obviously paraphrased but you get the point) But when it's said like th…

You have to keep in mind that humans evolved to live as hunter gathers in the savanna of Africa. Most of the things that come after that we were not evolved for. For example humans were not evolved to sleep in beds in air conditioned houses, etc. So evolution is not necessarily the most important factor. Life is a very complicated chemical process.
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