Eek, Ethilrist~ Should I take a lot of cyanide or a very small amount of cyanide? Convention medicine and homeopathy just don’t seem to go well together.
I feel compelled to swipe Jackmannii’s link on the homeopathy mass suicide attempt posted in a similar thread on this topic from about a month ago.
The problem with homeopathy, aside from it being a crock of shit, is that it supplants traditional, effective medicine. If your friend intends to use her four year degree in homeopathy to diagnose and treat illness, she could very well endager someone’s life. Such a thing would be absolutely morally repugnant. If she is a friend shouldn’t you point this out to her? Is the loss of her friendship sufficient threat for you to remain silent?
Dr. Robert Park quoted the New England Journal of Medicine on the subject of alternative medicine:
In other words, the very phrase “alternative medicine” is sort of meaningless - all it refers to is stuff that we seem to be willing to try, even though we have no evidence that it works!
Oh my God.
I just had a flashback to my senior year in high school.
For some reason, my legs, the inside of my elbows. and the front of my neck broke out in this itchy red scaly weepy rash. I didn’t get a full night’s sleep for nine months, because I would wake up itching and scratching.
My mother took me to an dermatologist, and when that didn’t work, dragged me to a homepathic doctor, who prescribed a change in diet (no mixing of meats and starches, I would eat a hamburger and raisins that had been soaked overnight for breakfast) and gave me some “ionic water” to spray on my skin to help the itching. They also rolled a roller ball over my skin and determined I was allergic to everything from lettuce and pork to ranch dressing. :rolleyes:
The rash was still there and it still itched like fury.
So, I started going for weekly high colonics. That was LOADS of fun, lasting an hour, which would clear out my impurities.
Throw in some chiropractic adjustments for my sublaxations.
It still didn’t work, so my mother dragged me across the state to another doctor who wanted a stool sample.
I had had enough at that point. My mother thoughtfully provided an empty margarine tub for me to poop in, but my 17-year-old self balked at that and I refused flat out.
That was the last doctor I went to.
My skin cleared up by the time I left for college, and it’s never come back. I think it was a combination of stress and a sudden onset reaction to our cats.
No one ever did find out what it was.
One of my cousins, a very intelligent, well-meaning and sweet woman, is a massage therapist. And she told me at great length about how some memories are actually stored in muscles.
I have two minds about homepathic medicine. I have always thought it was shit, and ranted against it many times to my friends. Then my aunt started taking this Zinc nasal spray stuff for colds. She couldn’t stand the zinc tablets, but didn’t mind the spray. I started looking into it and found the stuff she is taking is Homeopathic. She is an intelligent smart person, and I’m guessing she has just never heard of the ‘theory’ behind homeopathy. It started to tell her what a crock of shit it is, but caught myself and shut up.
She has always gotten really bad colds. Everytime I talked to her she was comming off a cold or entering one. Since she started the nasal spray stuff, she hasn’t gotten a cold, and constantly talks about how great the stuff is and how much her life is better now. Now, I still think Homeopathy is a pile of shit, and can be potentially dangerous if used to treat real conditions, ignoring real medicine. But this is just about colds which are largely in the head anyway, and if the psychosomatic, placebo effect works that well for her and makes her that happy, then I’m just going to shut up snort her way to health.
This is just dumb, sorry. Where do you think man-made drugs come from? Most are derived from plants and “natural stuff”.
Now, I don’t buy that natural is automatically better. I also believe that the positive effects of most herbal medicines are psychosomatic, or potentially overshadowed by the side-effects. But the truth of the matter is that most man-made drugs are discovered in nature and by studying the ethnobotany of indigenous cultures.
Westerners are the biggest snobs when it comes to medicines that aren’t in ready-to-swallow capsule and pill form. If it weren’t for herbalists, we wouldn’t have stuff like taxol, which has saved thousands of lives.
I think traditional and “alternative” medicine could learn a lot from each other.
I’m confused. There are zinc nasal sprays on the market, which have been proven to be one of the only effective treatments for colds (reduce average cold duration from 7 days to 2 days, IIRC). These are not homeopathic, they contain around .1% zinc - not a watered down 1:10000000000 dilution of .1% zinc.
Does your aunt have a .1% solution of zinc (which is not homeopathic), which for some stupid marketing reason got labeled as homeopathic? Or does she have some infinitely diluted solution of zinc (which would also not be properly homeopathic, since you’re suppossed to water down an illness-causing agent)?
Sorry to nitpick,
mischievous
Okay, someday I will learn to actually do the research before I post. Sorry wolfman, I was remembering studies done on zinc lozenges, not zinc nasal spray. From what I could find, noone has been able to show an effect for zinc nasal spray, while some groups find that zinc lozenges reduce cold duration (other groups don’t find this).
So yes, your aunt is probably experiencing a placebo effect.
mischievous
Okay I had to do some looking and remembering. I think what she was using was Zicam.
http://www.zicam.com/site/products/faq_c.html
When I first looked a couple years ago they were putting “Homeopathic cure” all over the place. I just assumed from that and didn’t really look farther. It still mentions it, but not as prominantly.
Later it also says
I don’t know if that is an 'effective medicine ’ level or a Homeopathic level when it comes to zinc. That would be strange if they are calling a standard medicine cure a Homeopathic cure just to get both sides of the fence or something.
Well it’s certainly a good thing I didn’t open my mouth back then, because I really have no idea what the stuff is even now.
Good grief, don’t do it, Apricot! If you dilute it to that extreme, it’ll become powerful enough to blow your head off!
Well, homeopathy is a load of nonsense. However, my daughter has low levels of things like zinc and other assorted vitamins and minerals, not all of which are found in a multi-vitamin.
So, she takes some capsules that contain a crapload of zinc (there are other things that she does better with mega doses of, but I’m not at home and I’m a terrible father who can’t remember any of that stuff) and other things. Are mega doses of things considered homeopathy? Christ I hope not.
I’m with you, monstro.
Of course, once an herb starts getting used to treat disease effectively, sit changes state so while it was a CROCK OF SHIT, it is now not an herb but a medicine, therefore most definately not a CROCK OF SHIT. Neat little trick.
Crikey. The problem with alternative/homeopathic/whatever medicines is not that they don’t work, it’s that they haven’t been PROVEN to work. Once you prove it to work, then it becomes accepted medicine.
That’s exactly how it should work. What’s your point?
As the link shows, the isolation and development of taxol as an anticancer drug comes courtesy of “Western” research and clinical trials, not herbalists.
There certainly have been a number of highly useful drugs used in mainstream medicine that were first known in folklore and used by medicine men, herbalists etc. Some of these include aspirin, colchicine and digitalis. Numerous other plant-derived drugs have been found to be ineffective and/or unacceptably toxic (i.e. comfrey and chaparral).
Some herbalists support research and double-blind trials in order to determine which traditional remedies are effective and acceptably safe. Many other devotees of herbalism, unfortunately, cling to unproven drugs and therapies discarded by medicine over the years as worthless (including colon purges and other flushes of “toxins”).
The National Institutes of Health supports research into “alternative medicine”. If we could only convince the big nutraceutical/supplement manufacturers to devote even a tiny fraction of their profits toward proving that their “alternative” remedies work, it would be enormously beneficial.
A little detour for skeptics.
I have a hard time reconciling how a thing can be a CROCK OF SHIT one moment and life saving medicine the next. Can you explain that part to me?
I picked up a tube of cream purporting to cure yeast infections one day while at the grocery store. I used it a couple of times, without getting relief. Then I examined the cream, and noticed that the key ingredient was Candida Albicans (sp?), diluted to whatever extent. I took the cream back to the grocery store and chewed out the manager, because all of the yeast infection creams that they carried were homeopathic. His response was that they’re cheap, and they sold a lot of them. I told him that they were full of the crap that I was trying to get rid of, and that the store should offer some creams that would actually do some good.
Shortly afterwards, we quit going to that store. Not just because of this issue, but it was a part of our decision.
So, the fact that numerous generations of, let’s just say Chinese, have experience relief from pain through the use of acupuncture means that acupucncture is a PROVEN medical technique and not an alternative medicine? I specifically used releif of pain because that is one of the simplest uses for acupuncture and I believe, accepted by many Western doctors as effective. Other uses are still being investigated, but again, it has worked for lots of people, just not people with white coats and investments in the manufacture of drugs.
Yes, I know not all Chinese herbalism is legitimate–no powdered rhino horn for me–but some of it is, or it would no longer be used. American Indians and then the pioneers used willow bark for headaches–it’s a form of aspirin. African and South American shamans used a variety of herbs to prevent infection and it wasn’t just hit or miss. After a few generations (if that), they figured out what worked, most of the time, and used that. Are modern antibiotics more effective? Yes, but that does not mean that the herbs are not a proven medicine.
Massage therapy is another one. Prehaps saying that memories are stored in muscles is stretching it, but a true theraputic massage will do wonder not only to relieve aches and pains, but to increase your flexibility, help maintain your posture, elevate your mood and lower your blood pressure. Psychologist say that the body/muscles “remember” things, meaning that unconsciously you react to certain stimulus based on experiences that you may not consciously remember. A massage may release tension on a physical level that may make it easier for an emotional release.
My friend’s mother died of cancer a few years ago. She had surgery, but for follow-up care, she was more comfortable with traditional Chinese medicine. Her Chinese doctor did prescribe some western medicines, along with specific teas and herbal remedies. She also had acupuncture, both for pain and for general strengthening of her health and she took up meditation. Her American doctor (who the Chinese doctor consulted with) agreed that she had lived as long or longer than she would have if she had had chemo, and that the quality of her life was better than it would ahve been with chemo. Eastern and Western medicine are not necessarily antithetical, and a medicine or treatment should not be dismissed simply because it was not developed in the West.
Personally, my problem with alternative medicine is that the reasoning behind it is a CROCK OF SHIT.
Sure, any particular substance might or might not cure some disease. Maybe herbalists are accidentally right about something, or their anecdotal evidence will be borne out by legitimate scientific inquiry. But the practice in general is still crap, because it rejects the best tools we have for ensuring that treatments are safe and effective.
Alternative medicine is based on magical thinking, placebo effect, anecdotal evidence, and a general willful ignorance of the myriad factors that can skew perceptions of effectiveness, as opposed to “conventional medicine,” which generally tries to filter out the aforementioned skewing factors, and make sure that only safe, effective treatments are used.