There’s a bit of difference between arguing that the FDA was too slow to approve Stevia as a sweetener and mandated excessive study, and claiming that there was corporate skulduggery to keep it out of the marketplace when it would otherwise have been okayed. If there’s proof of the latter, I’d like to see it.
A note on medical centers and academic institutions that have established programs in “alternative medicine”:
In many cases this appears to have been done as a marketing/moneymaking tool, showing that the institution is “relevant”. Partly it is an outgrowth of recognizing that a number of patients like the OP will be pursing non-mainstream remedies, and it’s an attempt in part to guide them on what does and doesn’t work, and to encourage them to share what they’re doing with their physicians so that harmful interactions with standard therapy don’t occur and they don’t waste their time with quackery.
Then again, there are a minority of physicians and other health care workers who buy into woo (an example being nurses in some hospitals who offer “therapeutic touch” to patients, despite the lack of evidence for this intervention).
I could go for a therapeutic touch right about now, know wadda mean?
Actually, therapeutic touch practitioners don’t actually touch you. That’s their thing…by just hovering their hands near you, they manipulate your “aura” or “energy field” or whatever to make you better.
Don’t knock it 'til you’ve tried it, bub.
I agree. And I’m actually pretty sure that sticking your hand in a garbage disposal will cure aids, migraines, and taco bell colon. You might think that sounds ridiculous, but don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.
What a wonderfully apt analogy. :rolleyes: But yeah, I’m confident that shredding your flesh with a garbage disposal will indeed cure a migrane, or at the very least, make it so you don’t care so much about the pain in your head anymore. Kind of a rough method, though, don’t you think?
It was only meant to illustrate “don’t knock it till you’ve tried it” is a stupid defense. There’s quite a huge variety of things you can make a reasonable judgement on without personally experiencing it.
Often I’ll see exactly this “argument” used against those who criticize quackery. People seeking info on quack cures will tune out anyone who hasn’t tried them personally. Testimonials rulz!
I don’t have to attempt to burn off a supposed skin tumor with caustic bloodroot salve in order to know that this can produce disfigurement, metastatic malignancy and death.
I don’t have to try drinking my own urine to know that consuming your bodily wastes is not a miracle cure for all kinds of diseases.
I don’t have to stick lighted candles in my ears to know that there is no physiologic basis to assume that this will clear out my sinuses.
You don’t have to emulate stupidity in order to know that it’s stupid.
Well, it might cure migraines…I mean, I don’t think it’ll be your HEAD that will hurt anymore, if you think about it. Or at least, you won’t notice it if it does.
But you don’t not have to, right?
I can’t decide if you’re being deliberatly obtuse for the purpose of trolling, or if you actually are this stupid.
I want to to explain to me how not doing anything to a person (which is what therapeutic touch is, essentially) can in any way cure a disease or illness.
Something I’ve noticed about idiots who believe in woo tend to believe most or all woo. I mean - you could think (for example) acupuncture really works and that medical science is wrong about it and still think therapeutic touch is bullshit, right? But it seems like people who buy into anything just buy into everything. Totally uncritical minds.
So KGS, what sort of alternative medicine, if any, seems implausible to you? Do you think herbal medicine, therapeutic touch, accupuncture, homeopathy, faith healing, urine therapy, healing crystals, and getting jerked off by a mythical creature are all valid treatments?
Anything is plausible if you believe it can work. That’s the rub – it’s BELIEF in the treatment that unlocks the healing power of the mind, not the auras/crystals/herbs themselves. For that matter, the same holds true with traditional treatment – how many cancer survivors do you know that had a negative attitude and believed firmly that they would NOT recover?
Look…I’m not saying that anyone should eschew modern medicine in favor of alternative therapies. But there’s nothing wrong with doing both at the same time. It’s YOU people who are saying that alternative medicine should be completely avoided; and frankly, it irks me that you are all giving brooklynn a head trip about his suddenly successful treatment, trying to convince him that it’s not really working or it’s only temporary, and that he’ll eventually get sick again. Makes me wonder what side your bread is buttered on, know what I mean? But hey, what do I know…somebody’s got to pay for the doctor’s yachts and fancy cars. :rolleyes:
Yup. If some treatments only work by the principle of placebo… it still means they work :-/
Sorry I didn’t respond sooner.
Read the wikipedia history of Taxol. First of all, it took about 30 years from discovery to FDA approval. This is about 20 years longer than average. Second, noone ever got a patent on Taxol. Third, the US government funded all of the early research, but eventually gave up in ineptitude. At that point, it asked the industry if anyone wished to take over, and by wiki’s subjective call, “only” four companies were interested. To finally seal the deal, the Gov gave Bristol-Myers Squibb [non-patent] monopolies on marketing, supplies of bark, and trademarks. BMS was given so much financial incentive that a 2003 General Accounting Office report concluded the Gov got screwed in the deal.
CLEARLY this is the exception that proves the rule.
Moron.
No, it’s not. Find me a study that proves the mind has some sort of healing power.
Because it’s never been proven to work. All we have is the occasional anecdote, which is NOT valid. We don’t know how **brooklynn[/]b was cured, or even if he had cancer in the first place. But going from everything we know about cancer, medicine, and alternative treatments, my money is on the radiation and chemotherapy. No alternative therapy has ever been shown to treat anything. Ever.
I’d dig up research papers if I really wanted to, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t care, wouldn’t believe them, and say they aren’t valid because they are obviously all sponsored by some sort of multi-national, global, big-pharma conspiracy. :rolleyes:
Well, you’re not going to find any mental healing power with that sort of attitude. :rolleyes:
Yawn. This meme is getting tiresome. And it’s patently disingenuous, because these peer-reviewed controlled studies you oh so treasure are naught but a collection of anecdotal experiences themselves. Sure, the statistics can tell you what’s more likely to heal you, but they cannot determine which person will get healed by which therapy on an individual basis. Do you truly think that one person’s testimony counts for nothing? Because if that’s so, then you genuinely cannot see the forest for the trees. It must suck to be you, believing that every person’s success story is someone who’s lying to you.
You know, I’d probably work up more of an outrage at your moronic claims if you didn’t take care to disqualify all your statements as insubstantial by spouting off crap like this. So thanks, I guess.
I just read the history of taxol here, and I really don’t see any unusual delays in bringing it to market. The idea that you can find a natural product and come up with it in testable quantities in any standard timeframe is pure fiction. In the early days, harvesting Taxol killed the trees. In addition, Taxol is an extremely complex molecule to synthesize from scratch. It’s only lucky that a plentiful precursor was found, and as the article says, BMS did attempt to excersize it’s proprietary ownership on the metal oxide synthesis. Ironically, what BMS did not do was develop fully patentable and more potent analogues. It is the natural product that was making them wealthy.
Of course, I don’t mean to defend BMS. It is pretty clear they got a sweet deal from the government. They attempted many squicky legal maneuvers to keep the drug and potential analogues under their sole control. But the time it took for Taxol to reach the market was very justifiable.
I think one of the reasons many drug companies avoid natural products is complexities in producing them. They are just as likely to find an effective drug by studying the trillions of compounds that the chemists can already make as the trillions of molecules found in nature. It is as much of a coincidence that the bark of the Yew tree produces a drug to fight breast cancer as some estrogen derivative. The difference is that the natural products are often next to impossible to make, but the hormone analogues have already been made.