Even worse, the FDA has been flexing its muscles trying to prevent CBD products being sold[0][1][2], despite the products being restricted having no health concerns. You can sell all manner of dietary supplements and "superfoods", but according to the FDA, not a cup of tea with a few drops of CBD oil.
[0]: https://www.inquirer.com/business/weed/cbd-legal-cannabis-we... [1]: https://reason.com/2019/09/07/pointless-cbd-bans-are-spreadi... [2]: https://thetakeout.com/cbd-food-drink-banned-illegal-states-...
To bring it to tech, it'd be like someone claiming that 'database system' was made up by Percona to market MySQL.
If they're knowledgeable on the topic then I'm sure having someone dismiss it as pseudoscience can be frustrating. I get that, but just saying someone's wrong isn't enough to change opinions. It doesn't need to be a research paper with citations, just a link to Wikipedia showing that it exists on a conceptual Level, or even a "I work in pharmaceuticals, it's legit". I'm at fault for not doing my own research as well, but thank you for settling things, looks like a lot of people learned something new
Source: https://www.healthline.com/health/endocannabinoid-system
HN Feature™ #36,812,938: we get to take in the bigger picture, as comments are not collapsed algorithmically (IIUC)
<3
There is no aspirin system but salicylates bind to COX, so we may well have had a salicylate receptor if things went slightly differently.
> other effects [...] are also being investigated
So, no.
> “ Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are COX-2 inhibitors that work, in part, by reducing the enzymatic degradation of the endocannabinoid anandamide ”
The human endocannabinoid system has vast and far-reaching implications regarding pain, inflammatory system and metobolic regulation.
> “ Studies at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland cloned the G-coupled protein receptor (GPCR) in 1990, which is the target for endogenous cannabinoid ligands, and named it, “Cannabinoid Receptor 1 (CB1 or CBR1). This receptor belongs to the Class A rhodopsin-like family of GPCRs [3]. A few years later, the second GPCR: “Cannabinoid Receptor 2” (CB2 or CBR2) was cloned [4]. The CB1 and the CB2 receptors participate in numerous essential biological processes [5]. Some of these are: Neuronal plasticity [6], pain [7], anxiety [8], inflammation [9], neuro-inflammation [10], immune function [11], metabolic regulation [12], and bone growth [13].”
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6770351/
Combine that with majority in many democratic systems being 51%.
And we’re in for a hell of a mediocre time.
Even if there's only a sucker born every minute, the web makes it easier to find them than hoping they come to within earshot of you or read your pamphlet.
The information available now is also vastly more watered-down, subjected to marketing-infused misinformation, and almost designed to keep people from gaining more information.
From that perspective, literacy is really just making it easier to convince people of lies.
My dad's mom, who I rarely visited other than for brief trips (his folks were avid dancers and would always show up at OUR house on Saturday evenings), watched my sisters and I so that my parents could go to a class reunion. Usually this would fall onto my mom's folks, but they were on some sort of vacation trip.
Anyway, my grandmother apparently really enjoyed reading tabloids. I had spent significant amounts of time at my other grandmothers' house reading Ripley's Believe It or Not books from cover to cover, and so I just started doing the same at my other grandmothers' house while eating Violets, a perfumed candy that was apparently popular amongst women at some point in time. Anyway, I thought that everything I was reading was true, including giant ants that were eating corrugated aluminum.
I spoke up to my grandfather, asking him whether he had protected his shed against these monstrous incursions, and he looked at me like I had 3 heads. It wasn't until my mom saw what I was reading when she returned that she understood what was happening.
What woke me up to the scam? It wasn't some Dostoevsky mock-execution come-to-Jesus moment. It was a gradual realization that none of these claims made as much sense as other explanations. And a slow but building sense of anger at the assholes who had made all this bullshit up to line their own pockets.
IIRC, with regard to supplements (as with homeopathy), the FDAs toothlessness is by statute, not discretion.
So, Congress needs to act.
Yeah I'm not sure what they're getting at. Isn't Endocannabinoid system just a shortened form of Endogenous Cannabinoid system?
Homeopathy.
Crystal healing.
Chiropractic.
Herbal medicine.
Chinese traditional medicine.
Cupping.
Acupuncture.
However, this would upset a lot of people and reduce taxes collected, so... never going to happen.
The only solution is education. Who gets something out of education can get better odds but at the end of the day people will do what the believe is best for them. Covid conspiracy theories and the reluctance to vaccinate is a very good example on how stubborn people are. Spending resources to fight against that is not the best use of resources imo.
That could be the Placebo effect, but my opinion is very much biased by my experience of quacks, it's sad to see older people fall for what quacks write.
> The only solution is education.
My friend's sister is a nurse, so I thought he'd be more educated about it. Turned out that he's terrified of it now from her stories about blood clots.
She started off x-raying my back to check if something was really bad (it wasn't), then did her little grappling knee chiropractor thing (which felt good), then proceeded to use an electric massage hammer to loosen up the muscles. After a couple of treatments, my back was back to normal.
I found a stomach exercise program, and the extra training combined with much better awareness of the symptoms, which I think I got out of the whole affair, has kept me well since.
I understand why you are saying what you are saying, I was there once too. But I think you're underestimating something. The chiropractor who treated me spent most of her time helping people with back pain. You could hear she had a pretty well-informed idea of what was wrong with my back, probably because she had seen hundreds of backs like mine before.
And if you actually study what doctors and physical therapists are doing, a lot of it is 100% in the quack domain. For instance, they see one symptom and then immediately jump to a conclusion about it. I don't blame them. When I see people developing software, I can't say most of them are being very scientific either.
Your therapist needs to have a good idea what's wrong with you, and effective means of getting to it. The actual theory they have in their mind is less important. I'm not religious or spiritual, but I believe my decision to go try the chiropractor was rational.
I believe a genuinely scientific doctor wouldn't merely use heuristics and would use actual science and personal examination to determine the best way to treat someone's problem. I believe some who may who title themselves "chiropractor" possibly may be good at accurately diagnosing and resolving people's back issues, but with a chiropractor you take on additional risks, like risk that your chiropractor happens to be one of the many who believe all diseases stem from spinal problems and can be treated through spinal manipulation, along with many other pseudoscientific, untrue beliefs.
It seems the best professional would be someone who titles themselves a doctor and attempts to be scientific and empirical, without believing anything about spinal issues causing all diseases, but who otherwise fits the description of the chiropractor you saw.
It's true that someone with a false, unscientific theory may end up more effectively treating particular patients than someone else with a true, scientific theory, but someone who's both effective and has a true, scientific theory will surely be superior to the alternatives. I see no reason why a scientific doctor can't specialize in back pain, use x-rays, use the devices you mention, etc. I believe many do.
Perhaps at that point it merely comes down to semantics of the title they use and the school they went to, but the pseudoscientific associations are so historically strong that it seems like it'd be a red flag that anyone would want to consider themselves a part of that profession in the first place. At the very least, you'd think they'd want to "fork" it and take the good parts and leave the bad parts.
If I couldn't seem to find a doctor who meets those criteria I describe above, I'd possibly consider trying to find a chiropractor who seems to use a science-based approach, but only if I had no other choice.
Curing, say, asthma? Yeah, maybe not so much.
You should have hardcore warnings on them (like on aus cigarrettes for example) that state clearly that studies have shown these ingredients or procedures have been shown to be no different from placebo for whatever, or have low quality/few studies. I think you should even have QR codes that link to a page that summarizes the evidence for them and links to the primary source. vitamins etc should also be clearly separated from actual medicine in pharmacies. In the case of cigarretts in Australia, this strategy has been proven to be more effective than the comparable strategy of banning marijuana (more kids in aus have tried marijuana than cigarettes now)
Banning these things can have several negative effects that probably harm the project of getting society to move away from this type of quackery.
Firstly you cannot stop people from wanting these things by banning them, so you will create a black market for them which is less safe, and also opens up a funding stream for nefarious actors.
Secondly, we should not close our minds to the fact that at some time in the future, it is a virtual guarantee that there will be some useful compound in, for example, some chinese medicine herb. if we snuff out all these practices, we deny ourselves one avenue for finding out about these compounds that we might otherwise simply not come across.
Third, banning stuff gives ammo to conspiracy theorists: "they are banning it because they don't want you to have it because they know it works and doctors will be out of business"
Go ahead and ban stuff that endangers near extinct animals, or maybe something that genuinely causes serious acute harm to a user, but generally I think its better to inform and regulate, rather than ban. You think you would be helping people but they don't want your help and they think you're trying to hurt them. Give them the info to work it out instead. Also, if some small girl wants to play an imaginary witch game with crystals, but all they crystals are banned, thats pretty sad to me.
Chiropractors should not be able to call themselves Drs. though. should straight up be a crime.
One counterpoint is that not banning things could increase general public trust in the regulator which could make disinformation less effective.
I'm not in favor of banning anything (pot smoker, drinker, and big fan of the Darwin Awards here). I don't think bans accomplish much besides increasing demand and black market crime around the forbidden thing. But I still have no idea how you stop grandma from eating horse paste when she hears on facebook that it cures covid.
If you let crazy people gives themselves titles like Doctor and open a shopfront, all legit and everything, then people will just take that kind of thing on face value.
Freedom doesn't mean the freedom to defraud and wipe out entire species.
A lot of people here are voting me down and saying that I'm totalitarian. I'm just advocating for banning some quacks from practising fake medicine. The opposite is allowing our planet's wildlife to be permanently, irrevocably wiped out in the name of old people getting erections or whatever.
Honestly, which is the more extreme position in your mind: Specicide or Regulation?
I appreciate this statement. But this statement is contrary to the modern Christian view. The modern evangelical Christian view is that God made Man to do whatever he wanted with the earth. That's the basic justification for wiping out species or strip-mining or polluting the air or the water. "Freedom" is a concept that was meant to imply freedom from imprisonment, torture, harm or oppression. Not the freedom to demolish anything in sight. Or the freedom to con other people. They use "freedom" like it's an end-run around morality.
I think we likely agree on these points, but perhaps not on the surrounding ones which don't have significant harm outside of parting foolish people from their money.
Several of my acquaintances have been recently defrauded out of thousands of dollars by phishing attacks. You know the type: you get an SMS about an $925 Amazon purchase that you made, just enter your credit card details here to cancel. That kind of thing.
Should we just let this stuff happen? Take the safety signs off and let Darwin sort them out? Why bother with those expensive tests and government approvals for medicine? Just let people figure what works and doesn't work on their own! I mean, sure, those foolish people will get themselves killed taking placebos for their cancer, but that's their own fault for getting tricked, right?
"They should have known better."
My view is that we are likely to have a greater impact on stopping this problem by using tactics other than banning them.
I'm sorry to hear about your aquantances phishing attacks. There are parallels to be sure, but Phishing attacks are a clear deception, and everyone upon being phished will agree that they have been done wrong by, so it is easy to make these illegal; you don't create a black market for people who want to go out and get phished anyway. Unfortunately the same is not true of people who purchase quack therapy. Most will continue to think that their money was well spent.
It's also not completely black and white. For example, the "science" behind homeopathy is absurd, and the medication is literally just water. That doesn't mean it can't be effective at treating someone's malady as a placebo, though. Little children with a sore throat may refuse to nap until they get "medicine".
Many adults also struggle with accepting inaction as the best course of action. If paying someone to stab them with little needles lowers their blood pressure during a stressful time, then perhaps it was worth it?
Acupuncture is FDA approved for the treatment of certain types of chronic pain (and, I believe, asthma). It's not entirely bullshit.