Four Thieves Vinegar Collective – Harm Reduction for the Living

Sometimes it included some cool detective work. In one case they were able to track the contamination down to post packaging. A component of the sticker glue diffused through the wall of the plastic bottle and contaminated the stuff contained therein.

So except for an excuse to tell this story my point is that maybe you can outsource the analysis. I admit I haven't checked if the labs accept samples from random people. In theory that should be possible.

Naaa. Same with prescription meds, open it up! Isn't that how we found a drug for a Parkinson's mouse model? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP]

Big brother's job is not to control and ban certain behavior. California thinks this way and aggressively enumerates every possible bad thing they can conceive of and making it illegal. As if slipping on a banana peel were illegal. It's borderline insane, like why not make getting sick illegal or being poor illegal, why not make changing lanes without a turn signal illegal. Ethically as long as the instructions say, "do this wrong and you'll die, it's a garage door spring" people will know. Or "take this medicine, but if you don't check your liver/kidney/clotting you may well die". In big bright red letters.

Don't make it impossible to do freely. Just make it impossible to do without reading and agreeing to the fact that you understand the big red letters. Understand the risks. Medicine is all about patient autonomy and this is the opposite.

(She's dead now, as you might have guessed.)

Well, this really is for the good of the vast majority of people. The problem is that this also applies to a minority of people, who have the skills to research thing and make educated decisions about things.

It's not a bad general rule, but maybe it should be overridable in certain circumstances, e.g. when you are experimenting on yourself.

For example, Promethazine has been popular in the UK for a very long time (ingredient in UK Sominex), but its not approved in the U.S. as a sleep aid.

InHousePharmacy.vu/search.aspx?searchterm=promethazine

Do most people feel this way about formalized medical practitioners today?

I advise anyone interested in pharmaceuticals to read The Old Vegetable Neurotics: Hemlock, Opium, Belladonna and Henbane, Their Physiological Action and Therapeutical Use Alone and in Combination, from the 1860s, I think. If you read between the lines, it is the story of a doctor who is immensely frustrated with the impurities of some common medicines, not knowing what you were getting, was this the actual chemical doing the job, and so forth. He proceeds to examine each part of the plant (leaves, stems, roots, flowers, and so on) to see which gives the best concentration. He then works at extracting exactly what he wants, very carefully. Then he tests tiny amounts of various rodents, then his dog, then himself, working to determine an appropriate dosage.

It's quite impressive and hardcore. You can feel this man's annoyance at the state of things and his passion to declare, "I'd rather just find this out now instead of waiting for everyone to keep fiddling about." With a small room and some glassware you could also do this. Now, it wouldn't be simple, and to be honest the various units used are a hot mess, but the basic principles are there.

Now, automatable is a matter of degree. Real chemists have whole flowcharts of "do this, do that next, now this other thing" to detect the presence of a particular sought-for thing, but that does not prove a negative, you do not know what else might be present. That's the real rub and why the focus of so much chemistry is on extraction and purification.

How is it connected?

Also I'd be interested in you're citation for the fluoride assertion, the last I remember that was a conspiracy theory and the actual published research was mixed and inconclusive?

Purification and analysis? That's the hard part.

Not getting screwed by additives, coatings or contamination? Thats what the big bucks in lab gear cost (i.e. a metered dispensing pump comes with a list of every element which touches the dispensed fluid).

I wonder why dentists don’t tell everybody to get a waterpik first before any other treatments.

I mostly agree with this. Most doctors are just reading off the Epic professional version of WebMD for most symptoms/conditions. It's especially important to do your own research and be your own advocate for any serious conditions so that you can ask the right questions, which sometimes snaps them out of the scripted response and consider other possibilities or concerns.

something something Bad Ideas forum.

You may have a "right to repair" something you bought. You didn't buy your body.

Drug safety is an old, old issue. We can argue about how it's applied without dragging in popular phrases that don't apply.

A parallel that comes to mind is "accredited investors". These are people that have chosen to opt out of the guardrails and been allowed to by fulfilling certain criteria. Maybe something like that would make sense for medicine.

I don't believe in the conspiracies you listed, but I absolutely believe there are plenty of conspiracies in plain sight (AMA restricting the number of doctors and fighting against single payer, the FDA being in bed with big pharma, etc).

We all should have the right to control our own bodies (which extends to recreational chemicals). For those compounds that are not yet vetted, we should have the right to make informed choices.

This movement is not about filling capsules with powdered ginger to treat something that it’s unable to. The goal is to synthesize molecules that have been studied and that we know work as a replacement for having to pay a doctor to get permission to buy them.