Today, someone said to me she didn’t want to have a tetanus shot because she “didn’t believe in putting chemicals in her body.” She also will not give her dog heartworm preventatives, thinks all vaccines and modern medicine are poison…however, she’s a big believer in “natural” supplements and buys tons of little pills from health food stores.
Anyhow, I don’t want to debate the relative merits of allopathic and alternative treatments. I am really curious about the “not wanting to use chemicals” statement.
Does it make sense? Why or why not? I’ve been reading various definitions of “chemicals” online and am just getting more confused. How is a pill a doctor prescribes different from a pill you buy from an online supplement store, in terms of “chemical” qualities?
I apologise for sounding like a really scientifically challenged dork. But, I am a really scientifically challenged dork.
Everything is “chemicals.”
The stuff out there in natural form ? Chemicals.
The process that renders teh natural stuff into “chemicals,” at least in the pharmaceutical industry, invovles isolating, refining and manufacturing some “chemical” component of a “natural product.” Example? Consider vitamin supplements … refined, isolated, standardised “chemicals.” Example? Taxol, originally refined from a component of the Yew tree. Example? Folic acid-enriched foods, using folic acid, a naturally occuring vitamin.
As for vaccines, they are based on altered forms of naturally occuring pathogens, and activate a natural human system, the immune response.
Yes.
Your body already has CHEMICALS IN IT, you twit. This is like saying “I don’t want to contaminate my car’s gas tank with filthy gasoline.”
Make sure your friend is aware of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide.
Agreed. All your body is made of chemicals. Food is chemicals. Everything organic is chemical, albiet in different forms.
You might want to break it to your friend that virtually all the produce, even in organic and specialty stores, is “genetically modified” by humans. Most of it was done using the slower methods rather than the newer methods but the idea and results are the same.
This topic has become so loaded and political that it’s hard to talk about it levelheadedly-- but I will try.
Some people here are taking the word “chemical” literally, when I don’t really think she meant it like that. She probably meant that she doesn’t want to consume chemicals that are made by complex processes in laboratories-- or to put it another way, consume chemicals that aren’t essential components of something that exists in nature. (yes, you can quibble with this; a lot of artificial flavors are derivatives of chemicals in natural foods, or are the same chemicals as are in natural foods. Nevertheless, I think I’ve gotten the gist of her attitude)
I sympathize with her, but the problem is that she’s buying pills that supposedly have these ‘natural things’ in them, but which are also probably filled with the same things she’s trying to stay away from.
Her situation exemplifies what has happened over the years in our culture of trying to adopt quick and easy fixes-- particularly in the medical and health fields. My guess is that it happened like this: initially, there was a movement to move away from nutritionally-barren processed foods towards a more healthy diet consisting of fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs, etc. Then people started to think that it wasn’t the overall benefits of eating fresh foods high in fiber and vitamins that gave the diet its value, it was the stand-alone chemicals in the diet. Then people tried to turn a fresh food diet into a set of pills that would simulate the basic components of the diet without your having to actually eat the food. You could eat the same junk you normally did but supplement your diet with extracted and manufactured chemicals. The problem is that most dieticians agree that the absorption rate is much lower with pills, and moreover I think you lose a lot of the benefits (fiber, for example) that come with changing to diet that has less processed food in it. My opinion is that people who try to get the benefits without the diet are wasting their money. So to answer your question, I don’t think what she’s doing makes sense at all.
Since “nutritional supplements” are not IIRC regulated by the FDA they are probably made to far lower quality standards and or lack extensive safety testing.
In some ways I would feel safer with an experimental drug than many OTC herbal supplements.
This is the first thing I thought of, when reading the thread title. Then I thought of the “one molecule away from plastic” thing.
Yeah, warn her about sodium chloride as well. Dangerous.
And ascorbic acid. Orange juice is full of that. Better stay away.
OK, I knew everything is chemical, but I couldn’t put that to her convincingly. And, she’d probably spout junk science gobbledygook at me and I wouldn’t have any good solid comebacks. Not that it would do any good, and it makes me nuts…this thinking is common among my circle of friends.
You guys are giving me some handy comeback material though. 
I feel sorry for her poor dog. Are you in a mosquito-prone area? Is her poor dog going to just die of heartworms? And is she just letting the other “naturally-occuring” parasites that dogs are subject to feast on him? Tapeworms, whipworms, roundworms, hookworms, fleas… . She can do what she wants to herself, but I hate to see an animal suffer because the owner isn’t real bright.
Since the drug manufacturing process is more regulated than the manufacture of supplements, a pill a doctor prescribes is far more likely to actually contain what the packaging says it does, in the quantities it says it does. There’s a lot of natural variation among herbs, so you could be getting a different dose of whatever medicinal chemical there is in the herb in one pill than you would from another, even though they’re labelled the same.
Herbs are at least as likely as allopathic medicines to cause side effects (at least, if you’re taking enough of it to possibly do any good), and the side effects in herbal medicines are not as likely to have been studied extensively. It might also be harder to find out which herbs might interact in an undesirable way (St. John’s wort, for example, can reduce the effectiveness of birth control pills). The more different herbs she takes, the more likely an interaction becomes.
No. It’s a fashionable form of ignorance.
While I agree with the rest of your post, I must hasten to defend poor SJW. It has not been shown in vivo to affect birth control pills. It’s been taken by millions of women in Germany for decades with no increase in birth control failure. There is a theoretical concern because it is so wonderful at increasing liver function, but it has never been shown to be of real concern.
OTOH, it does cause failure of some other important drugs because the liver metabolises them too quickly thanks to the SJW.
(from here)
As for the OP, my all purpose quip for people like these is “Syphyllis is natural, but I don’t want it in my body!” Doesn’t do a thing for them, of course. But it makes me smile.
Might want to point out to her that snake venom, poison ivy and deadly nightshade are all “natural”. Would she want to put them in her body?
The prescription drug is far more likely to have a standardized amount of active ingredient, to be tested for purity, and to be without hidden and unwanted additives (like the steroids and other adulterants (including extreme nasties like aristolochic acid) that have been found in “traditional” or “herbal” remedies).
There’ve been studies on potency in supplements showing wide variability. Echinacea pills/capsules, for instance, can have very little of the active ingredient(s)
It can be a real crapshoot for those taking supplements. Most mind-boggling are the people who swear by imported Chinese traditional medicines, with the label full of things of whose actions and interactions they have only the faintest idea, not to mention the stuff that never finds its way onto the label.
GAAHH!! I read all the way through and no-one took my line, and then just at the end… Course I usually phrase it “I like all natural foods! Nope, nothing but all natural rat droppings, organic roach legs, and pesticide free Hemlock for me!”
I knew a guy would complain about preservatives in food, and then retire to drink a bottle of gin.
I like to use “afalotoxin is all natural, and it is still the most potent carcinogen ever tested…but its not like is common, its produced by bread molds, grain molds, and cheese molds…and its a nice slow death by liver cancer, so you have lots of time to get your affairs settled.”
Quite literally, imported suppliment can kill you and have killed people. I forget the details too much to Google, but there was a documentary about young women taking an imported amino acid suppliment and dying some strange paralytic death. To this day nobody knows what was in the suppliment and how they died.
I am so going to steal that one… 