Don’t Take Medical Advice From the New York Times Magazine
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Matter is made up of atoms, and those atoms form various chemical elements or compounds or mixtures. We breath chemicals, we eat chemicals, we touch chemicals every day. Just because some foodstuffs have listed ingredients, with names that are sometimes difficult to read out loud (I have no trouble with the names, but then again I grew up with a parent who majored in chemistry) doesn't mean that those foods are dangerous. Whatever kind of food you think is perfectly safe surely contains some compounds with chemical names that are hard to spell or pronounce, but are nevertheless perfectly "natural," and usually not listed on an ingredients label. Don't worry about it.
"100% Chemical Free!"
I agree with your point though. Lots of natural things are deadly. In fact, the most toxic compound known is natural: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulinum_toxin
I learned about this name change from what has to be my favorite interview with a CEO ever, in which the Dow Chemical CEO actually said "Yeah, it’s a branding topic. So we’ve got to go out there and really re-educate humanity, because at the end of the day, 95 percent of all products out there have chemistry in them."
One of my favorite "scientific" journals, the JAYFK (title is NSFW, the content is fine), had a lot of fun with this quote. http://www.thejayfk.com/?p=2212
So by that definition, that salad I harvested from my allotment garden last summer doesn't have "chemistry in it". It grew all by its own, and then I washed it and ate it raw.
"Humans evolved consuming only organic material from their very beginnings up until about 100 years ago. Humans just haven't evolved to tolerate synthesised chemicals in a mere 100 years."
(that's obviously paraphrased but you get the point) But when it's said like that, I tend to agree with them. When they're called "chemophobic" in articles like this, I tend not to agree with them. I've no clue which to agree with.
I can't speak for everyone, but I am of the opinion that glucose synthesized in a lab requires no special evolution on the part of humans to process.
Avoiding taking prescription drugs unless you really have to (ie are going to die), as I do, is not a bad way to live. Just because natural things will kill you, does not mean we should not avoid man made things. So I do not take pills for headaches, for sleeping, etc...
You thinking is because you can die by a bear, you should not look before crossing the road.
But consider the flip side; just because some man made things can kill you, does not mean we should avoid man made things.
You thinking is because you can die by a bear, you should not look before crossing the road.
You are really reaching.
Being in pain when there is a simple, cheap, safe, effective medication is a bad way to live.
This works for non extreme pain, of course.
All of these things help keep pain going on longer.
For long term pain with no worrying cause you should carefully take pain killers and keep moving. Things like lower back pain (which can have serious causes, so get it checked) get much worse if you stop exercising, but get better if you get appropriate exercise.
Nope. Simplistic, backwards thinking.
There's nothing dangerous about taking a valium to help you sleep once in a while, unless you have a specific allergy. And that is what you would be instructed to do if you were suffering from insomnia or panic attacks.
They are controlled because they are dangerous in large amounts and addictive if used frequently.
Some antibiotics are controlled because people see them as a magic cure-all and would take them for everything, which would even more rapidly lead to resistant strains of bacteria and make the antibiotics useless.
So sure, some drugs are dangerous when used as instructed, but many are only dangerous when abused, and some have wider implications for society.
Glucose is a catch-all term referring to both chains and cycle structures based on a certain "base" of atoms, and that base is chiral -- it is different from its mirror image. Glucose thus refers to both L-glucose and dextrose. You can process both in some ways -- they both taste sweet to you. But you can't metabolize L-glucose, because the first step uses a similarly chiral enzyme called hexokinase, which only fits properly with dextrose.
Most lab synthesis of glucose (which is to say, pretty much all lab synthesis which is not bio-synthesis) is symmetric under mirror reversal and thus produces 50% dextrose, 50% L-glucose. So about half of the glucose synthesized in a lab requires special evolution on the part of humans to process.
Also, there are plenty of unhealthy and downright hazardous natural products. For example, ergot of rye is a hallucinogen which is poisonous in moderate doses and has many toxic side effects at lower doses. Botulism is extremely hazardous, of course. Cassava is highly toxic when eaten raw and the right variety can easily kill a human with a dose the size of an ordinary meal if not prepared correctly. And, of course, one would not want to eat a salad of Rhubarb leaves, poison ivy, nightshade, hemlock, and mistletoe berries. Whether you're dealing with synthetic or natural products discretion is always necessary.
Then again, a lot of the foods we so enjoy are enjoyable precisely because they contain things designed to kill or discourage pests. Capsaicin, for example, or caffeine. And much of human history is owed to alcohol; when safe drinking water is scarce, there’s always beer.
Chemophobia is about nothing more than familiarity. What we are familiar with we accept and are comfortable with, what we are unfamiliar with we are more likely to be afraid of. News organizations play this up all the time, because playing on fear of the unusual is an easy way to gain ratings (especially in a modern world where anything unusual that happens anywhere on Earth can be fodder for a local news broadcast).
For example, imagine you hear a story of someone having died in an arson fire, the news will probably have little impact on you, you may not even feel anything other than a small degree of sadness. Now imagine that you hear another news story, except this one is about how someone tampered with someone else's toothpaste and snuck in eggs of a parasite which then hatched and grew in the victim's intestines for a day and eventually led to the death of the victim. You'd almost certainly pay attention to that story, and you'd probably have strong feelings about it too. And you'd also likely feel a little wary whenever you brushed your teeth or bought toothpaste. You'd almost certainly never feel wary or in fear of arson while living in your apartment though, and you probably wouldn't think about how horrible dying from fire could be. However, in the US the risk of dying from arson is far, far higher than dying from intestinal worms. However, in some parts of the world the latter would be far more common and familiar.
Just because something is common and familiar doesn't mean it's safe, and the inverse is true as well.
I'm fairly sure that we still haven't adapted to consume anything but organic material.
Maybe they aren't poison, and just maybe we've all benefited from the rise of synthetic medicine (amongst other things).
How many people would die if not for ambulances?
I'll re-pose my initial point as a question to see if it comes across as less simplistic - If humans haven't evolved to tolerate synthesised chemicals in the last 100 years, but our atmosphere, food and medicine is full of them, why are we living longer than ever?
Humans also evolved to have a dozen or so children and see four or five of them make it to adulthood.
The reason you see life expectancies as low as 35 for past European cultures isn't that the people were dying in early middle age: Adults could and did live to see 70 or more. It was because they had horrible infant mortality rates combined with horrible death tolls from childhood illnesses.
The only thing keeping everyone from going back to that is chemicals. The modern First World have-three-kids-keep-three-kids lifestyle is entirely artificial. It depends on artificial things to keep it going.
Be rational about risks and benefits of chemistry and pharmaceuticals, but do worry about it.
Doctors are humans and are therefore also subject to being lazy, greedy, ignorant, etc.
Just because they seem to have more knowledge and use something of a scientific method doesn't mean they aren't locked into their ways, always giving the same kind of diagnosis for certain symptoms without questioning their limited knowledge.
They also face pressure from insurance and government agencies to behave in certain manners.
As many of us are coders, let me put it this way - have you ever looked up to another coder because they seemed to know so much more than you? Then after some years you surpassed them in your knowledge and looked back on their code and realized it was a "bit cr*p" in parts?
Yeah well your doctor is like that too. If they aren't constantly learning and researching, they are set in their ways and being moved by forces that may not make the best decisions for your health.
Also, 6 weeks on methotrexate is not a very long trial.
Except for it's ameth, which would mean lack of intoxication, a la 'amethyst'.
In fact the whole article is complete BS as it doesn't even remotely align with the views the author presents in the original article -- nowhere does the author say that she is 'chemophobic', nor is this even hinted at beyond her saying that her husband has always been "more comfortable with pharmaceuticals, more trusting in general." And of course naturopathic medicine is going to seem like pure evil if you're willfully blinding yourself to the arguments in its favor and only seeing the (legitimate) weaknesses, as will anything else for that matter.
http://blog.norml.org/2010/02/17/%E2%80%98gold-standard%E2%8...
The vast majority of commonly used plant medicines have undergone at least some scientific testing. The efficacy of specific drugs for specific conditions varies from extremely beneficial to completely useless or outright dangerous, the same as with any other medicine. And as with other medicines there are a lot of gaps and uncertainties in the research, although with plant medicines its usually because of lack of funding rather than because of bias stemming from the funding mechanisms.
Do you have a source to support the concept that the problem with plant medicine is the lack of funding in the face of promising early studies?
First, marijuana is still illegal for doctors to prescribe in all 50 states, so saying that it's already used in modern medicine is a bit dubious.
Any examples of things not used by modern medicine that are shown to have efficacy?"
This largely depends on how you define 'modern medicine' and 'have shown efficacy'. E.g. modern as in modernism, or modern just meaning anything that's currently widely used? Because if you're defining modern in terms of modernism, which would be the most natural use of the word, then by definition no plant medicine can ever be part of modern medicine since it goes against everything that modernity stands for. If on the other hand you're defining modernism as anything that's currently widely used as part of medicine, then you get into the issue of widely used by who? In any event I'm going to take a pass on answering that only because I think it's largely a moot point to begin with, as I was only arguing that naturopathy can be useful and not that it is never used by 'modern' medicine (however you define it).
"Do you have a source to support the concept that the problem with plant medicine is the lack of funding in the face of promising early studies?"
So lack of funding is only one of the problems. Another big problem is 'blobology', which Willoughby Britton explains here:
http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2012/10/bg-266-mindful-binge-dr...
The basic concept is that every study is looking at something a little bit different, so even if there are hundreds of studies on some medicine and they are all positive, it still isn't necessarily conclusive. If you google for studies on the efficacy of, say, aloe vera for treating burns, you will see that pretty easily. And it shows up pretty widely, as it's just a problem that's inherent with science right now.
I haven't taken the time to find a great source for funding specific stuff, but just a quick Google search shows that total US biomedical research spending is about 94 billion as of 2003, and the total NIH grants for CAM research (so not just naturopathy) are 441 million. (And presumably the amount of commercial research done on naturopathy is almost zero since plants can't be patented.)
Dronabinol is on formularies all over the US. There are marijuana dispensaries in many places. MDs write letters saying they believe their patients are best served by inhaled marijuana. What is legal and what has evidence are sometimes two different entities.
> And presumably the amount of commercial research done on naturopathy is almost zero since plants can't be patented.
Plant derivatives are patented all the time, so this isn't the reason that nobody is willing to invest in naturopathy.
There are definitely trials showing that marijuana is more effective than pure THC. As for whether it holds as a general rule, I don't think that's really empirically testable since there are probably an infinite number of cases both where it is and isn't true. I don't think everything is reducible though, because for any given plant there are trillions upon trillions of possible permutations of chemicals, and I think the fact that it's a little bit different every day and somewhat random probably helps to prevent the efficacy from declining over time, as happens with most pharmaceuticals. (The first rule of recreational drug is 'rotate your receptors', and I see no reason as to why that shouldn't apply to medicine as well.)
Needless to say, that won't do anything to change her mind -- not that she has to, it's just me being a pain in the butt gaucho. She is a vegetarian for a myriad of subjective reasons that I could never even start to debase or crack. I've never heard of chemophobia (and the Chrome spell-checker hasn't either), but I think that turning a desperate quest by a mother into a bunch of molecules and atoms is an oversimplification of a complex, subjective choice made by complex, subjective minds.
If you read the original article, you'll see that she didn't "ditch" the advice. She kept giving her son the prescribed medication. She discussed "Walker's Regimen" with Dr. Kahn who approved it in conjunction with methotrexate. Dr. Immundo gave her the number of a complementary practitioner.
The parents agreed that they would wait 6 weeks without increasing the dosage. They did that, their kid got better.
Seems like a perfectly sensible course of action to me. I think even though Michelle M. Francl (author of the OP) touts her self as a "scientist" her article is just as influenced by emotion as the original article she's referencing.
The only valid point she makes is that Susannah Meadows refers to the use of "four-miracles powder" as a "drug free" solution. Cool, that's inaccurate and pointing out that chemicals in "magically named" complementary medicines are just chemicals the same as any other is a valuable discussion to have.
But she allows a really derisive and dismissive attitude to creep into her writing which has no place in scientific discourse.
I realise that Meadows' article is just as emotive, but at no point does she try and take the intellectual high ground.
TL;DR: we sought advice from everyone, tried everything, and our son got better as a result. Win.
The more interesting thesis of the original article is that some inflammatory disease is related to a 'leaky gut' syndrome and that it could be modulated by diet and changing gut flora. Unfortunately this argument was not made very rigorously in the article, and while it remains controversial there is a lot of ongoing research into the idea.
From TFA:
>several recent peer-reviewed studies have shown that at least one of the active drugs in four-marvels powder, quercetin, exhibits anti-inflammatory activity.
Dismissing all traditional treatments without using research is just as woo-ey as blindly accepting them.
I won't get into why a homeopathic remedy can't work. It should be pretty obvious just based on what homeopathy claims
I didn't mean to imply that traditional treatments can't contain active ingredients that can be useful -- they surely can, and are the source of many drugs.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/01/28/you-cant-have-n...
> the NPLEX (Naturopathic Physicians Licensing Examinations), which is required for naturopaths to be licensed in the 16 states in the U.S. and 5 provinces in Canada that license naturopathic physicians tests naturopaths on homeopathy
> Then there’s the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP). If you take a look at its blog and search it for the word “homeopathy, you’ll rapidly see that the largest “professional” organization of naturopaths not only embraces homeopathy but defends it against attacks.
To reply to you: I challenge you to define "chemical" in the way you are attempting to redefine it. People want to use it to describe unsafe or non-natural compounds, but a little bit of thinking will quickly show that that definition is impossible.
Use chemical as an adjective instead of a noun and you will do much better.
Used as a noun chemical has no meaning: Everything is a chemical, so saying the word says nothing at all.
Just for the record.
I, for one, am not chemophobic. I personally know an individual who developed one of the first total-syntheses (i.e. "artificial" chemical synthesis) of a very important anti-cancer agent, Taxol. The TS of Taxol was exceedingly important, since a single dose required the sacrifice of an mature Yew tree -- something that would have been entirely unfeasible for the millions of people that stood to benefit from the drug.
But there are miraculous, mysterious things that we do not understand about natural products and the human body. Take Yerba Maté, for example, a popular beverage in Argentina and coffee. Or wine and whiskey. What all these beverages have in common is that they rely on a principal chemical agent for their effect (methylxanthine or caffeine in the case of Yerba Maté and Coffee; ethanol in the case of wine or your favorite alcohol). Yet as the more sensitive among us have realized, each different concoction effects us differently -- even though the principal ingredient is the same (people report calming, yet stimulating effects from Yerba Maté as opposed to caffeine, etc.)!
It turns out there is a very simple explanation for this. There are other constellations of chemicals in these concoctions which, in concert create an altogether particular and unique effect. This, I believe, is where "chemophobia" lies for some individuals (though again, I argue it is not widespread among the greater population). It lies in the fact that we are applying something very strong in a way that is not balanced or integrated. One very real mainstream example of this is how calcium is accompanied by vitamin D, as the latter enhances absorption of the the former. Since vitamin D helps strengthen the effect of calcium, patients can take safer doses of calcium which have great physiological effect. Another example is the fact that African American heart patients who take ACE inhibitors (drugs that lower blood pressure) along with diuretics have much, much better clinical outcomes than taking ACE inhibitors alone, which is the standard of treatment for most individuals.
The hope, then, is that when taking something more "natural" as opposed to man-made is that that natural product will inherently contain a wider variety of compounds that taken together create a more potent, but gentle effect on the patient. Now of course, these effects could be created by taking combinations of man-made products. But first these combinations need to be discovered, and we are certainly a long ways off from that. And it is not easy--different people are affected by different combinations and deciphering the key players out of a set of natural products is not easy. This will take many more years of careful, non-biased research. And there is indeed incredible bias against natural products among mainstream medical establishment, which is rather absurd given that so many of the drugs we take today come from natural sources! To me this is the real travesty, not "chemophobia."
Moreover, we need to embrace treatments that work, even if we can't explain them (provided that they are safe--more on this and LD50's in a moment). Good scientists work with existing knowledge. Great scientists love the perplexing, paradoxical, seemingly impossible phenomena that are not well characterized, which the FDA (about the most mainstream medical organization on the planet) does not necessarily approve of, for which there are no established doses or LD50's. Why is the author so insistent on the notion of LD50's when so many people have taken natural products for hundreds of years without ill-effect (that's a pretty amazing safety standard, in a way -- the fact that people without any scientific background have safely taken and studied natural products without modern science; namely by studying themselves; in India and China there were masters at this sort of art).
Sorry for such a long response. I hope someone appreciates these comments.
EDIT: I just want to add one other thing. Rofecoxib (better known as Vioxx) has an established LD50. For mice it is 300mg/kg, for rabbits it is 3.2g/kg, and for rats it is 980mg/kg [2]. But you know what? Vioxx exacerbated heart disease for at least thousands of people and should have been recalled years earlier than 2004[1]. An established LD50 does not mean a drug is safe.
[1] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
Mysterious, sure.
Miraculous? http://i.imgur.com/SeOnW.jpg
Awwwaaayyyyyyyyy!
Winners Often Use Drugs
Then again, there are mysterious things we do not understand about the human body itself, and the chems as well: there are a number of drugs which do work, but we have no idea what their mechanisms of action are, we just know they work (or seem to anyway).
Take good old aspirin for instance, we do understand mechanism of action... since 1971, even though aspirin has been manufactured and marketed since 1899 and willow-based medicines (and other salicylate-rich compounds) have been a staple of medecine since at least 2000 BCE.
A) the empirical no-risk evidence comes from centuries of field-testing on people. Logical consequence is run for dear life from "new" herbal / traditional medicine stuff. It fails to take into account historical evidence of useless treatments that were still accepted for centuries (take bleeding patients for example).
B) the result from keeping naturally occurring chemicals together in a medicine can make for a more efficient / less aggressive concoction. It's true. But emphasis on CAN here. It also can make you ingest toxic compounds that are totally unnecessary and may be dangerous. The point is you don't know, and since there's nothing miraculous about this kind of stuff, it can be tested ahead, which is the whole point of the FDA, however flawed some of its processes might be. This empirical testing is also how drugs are improved with minimal adverse effect on people (and max adverse effect on mice), and how treating HIV-patients with a cocktail of chems was found to be most effective. The list goes on.
I think we absolutely need to be able to explain something before declaring it relatively safe, and remain conscious that there are always outlying risks, be it only allergy. Everything is indeed a chemical, it's a simple enough fact, and people should realize that this holds true for all traditional / herbal remedies as well. This selective chemophobia the author talks about stems imo in large part from a distaste for the pharmaceutical industry (and its shadier practices), but it doesn't make the rational approach of trying to understand how chemicals would affect our organisms, before ingesting them, any less valid.
But I agree that if you don't use these characters, setting it up to type one or two odd characters isn't worth the hassle.
Now you've mentioned it, I can make easily a lot of symbols I've never used as well: ₈8⁸ǫẹ. That might come in handy writing formula in plain text.
And why would they? You are pretty much literally assuming an intelligent design behind the mate plant or Meadows's Montmorency cherry juice. But from an evolutionist perspective, what reason is there for a random plant to contain just the right mix of chemicals to produce the most beneficial effects in humans?
There is none, of course - except where the plant has been cultivated, that is, subjected to artificial selection. But while farmers can and did select for taste, yield, size, color, how could they select for an ideal balance of chemicals they don't even know about? How could they optimize for medical benefits without double-blind trials, and when most of their harvest is used for other purposes anyway? Why trust an imprecise, blind form of artificiality over a scientific, informed one?
By the way, some of the plants more painstakingly selected for human benefit - cereals - are the source of one of the (real or supposed) villains in Meadows's story: gluten. And even more exotic (and therefore appealing) South American plants like the Solanaceae (potato, tomato, eggplant...) contain significant amounts of toxic alkaloids. So much for the harmonious, "gentle" blend of compounds in natural products!
So while there may be a _reason_ the mate plant evolved to have pleasant effects on us, this is not necessarily because there is a design or teleology.
You should also consider that humans and the mate plant have coexisted for maybe 15 thousand years, which is not really a lot of time to come to a perfectly harmonized balance with the entire ecosystem; and that the average (US) American's ancestors have been around the mate plant for approximately zero generations, so, if they are to benefit from the short period of co-evolution of the plant with humans, it needs to be through changes in the plant (and it seems to me that an animal would evolve to maximize benefit from its food source faster than the food source would evolve to maximize benefit to it).
You may then say that the plant co-evolved with animals similar to us, but then, see the comment someone else made about lethal doses being quite different between species. I am not disputing the presence of beneficial compounds in some plants, but the claim that they would somehow contain the perfect blend that maximizes benefit to our particular species.
Also, "pretty much" is not a grading adverbial phrase.
You've just argued against animal husbandry, by the way.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/03/theorizing-more-b...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3299529/
Various organisms (i.e., bacteria, fungi, plants and animals) within an ecosystem can synthesize and release into the environment certain longevity-extending small molecules. Here we hypothesize that these interspecies chemical signals can create xenohormetic, hormetic and cytostatic selective forces driving the ecosystemic evolution of longevity regulation mechanisms. In our hypothesis, following their release into the environment by one species of the organisms composing an ecosystem, such small molecules can activate anti-aging processes and/or inhibit pro-aging processes in other species within the ecosystem. The organisms that possess the most effective (as compared to their counterparts of the same species) mechanisms for sensing the chemical signals produced and released by other species and for responding to such signals by undergoing certain hormetic and/or cytostatic life-extending changes to their metabolism and physiology are expected to live longer then their counterparts within the ecosystem. Thus, the ability of a species of the organisms composing an ecosystem to undergo life-extending metabolic or physiological changes in response to hormetic or cytostatic chemical compounds released to the ecosystem by other species: 1) increases its chances of survival; 2) creates selective forces aimed at maintaining such ability; and 3) enables the evolution of longevity regulation mechanisms.
Anyway, South America was colonized by humans around 15 millennia ago. Does that look like a reasonable time frame for humans to evolve a positive reaction to the specific blend of chemicals in the mate plant? Does that sound like it would have any impact at all on a white North American child with no indigenous American ancestry? Of course not.
"It lies in the fact that we are applying something very strong in a way that is not balanced or integrated."
Magical thinking detected.
There is no evidence that taking combinations is inherently a good thing. Some things work well on their own, some work well in combination, some combinations antagonise horribly and can kill.
"yet as the more sensitive among us have realized, each different concoction effects us differently -- even though the principal ingredient is the same"
Meh. Alcohol gets you drunk. The main difference in effects you'll see between different types of alcohol is how concentrated it is, how fast you drink it and how much you take down. Drunk is drunk one way or another.
"Moreover, we need to embrace treatments that work, even if we can't explain them"
We do, what we don't need to embrace is stuff that hasn't been shown to work, contains all sorts of stuff in all sorts of unknown quantities.
No, an established LD50 does not mean a drug is safe. This absolutely does not mean that bizarre concoctions of unstandardised plant material are safe in any way at all.
I didn't interpret his post as containing any magical thinking or handwaving, per se. Rather, I think's saying that there are interactions and compounds in drugs we use that we don't (yet) fully understand. Where you and he differ is that he advocates the use of compounds that seem to work, but whose mechanism of action we don't fully comprehend -- whereas you appear to take a more cautious view of said compounds.
Personally speaking, I sort of fall in between your two positions. There are a lot of treatments in modern medicine that are effective, but whose precise workings science does not fully comprehend. I support the use of these treatments, so long as longitudinal data shows them to be safe and effective, and their benefits to outweigh their drawbacks. However, I don't support remaining ignorant about them -- I believe we should keep striving to fully understand what's going on underneath the hood, so to speak.
"Meh. Alcohol gets you drunk. The main difference in effects you'll see between different types of alcohol is how concentrated it is, how fast you drink it and how much you take down. Drunk is drunk one way or another."
The same quantity of alcohol does, indeed, have different effects on different people. This is correlated with gender, body weight, the liver's ability to metabolize the alcohol, individual neurochemistry, etc. There is a panoply of systems within the body that react to the presence of something like alcohol, and that differs from person to person.
In a macro sense, yes, alcohol gets everyone drunk. But the rate at which it does so, and the quantity needed, and the long-term damage, can be quite variable.
"We do, what we don't need to embrace is stuff that hasn't been shown to work, contains all sorts of stuff in all sorts of unknown quantities."
Agreed. We may be living in a golden age of snake oil. The unregulated supplement industry is enormous and growing. Much of the unproven stuff is useless, some of it is dangerous, and more of it will probably be shown to be dangerous in future studies.
I certainly advocate the use of things for which there is evidence that they work, even if we have no idea how. I'm just very cautious about hailing these things without investigation, or elevating the natural above the artificial (whatever that means) because of some vague belief in plant synergy.
I like the aspirin example here - aspirin can be produced from salicin in willow bark. Willow bark itself can be used in much the same way, but contains tannins that can damage liver and kidneys over time.
So I think we absolutely should use and investigate 'natural' remedies that seem to work, but we should never assume that they're better or that we can't do better.
No argument here, or at least not from me.
Unless there is evidence to support that position, that's indistinguishable from magical thinking rephrased to sound scientific.
Magical thinking is the belief that there is some fundamentally unknowable-to-man mystique underlying the workings of drugs. That's not what anyone's saying is the case here. Rather, they're saying that certain drugs work, and that the reasons are potentially knowable to science, but in many cases may not be known yet. (Or fully known yet).
There is no scientific basis for that. It's just one guy's opinion. Could he investigate it in a scientific fashion? Sure. Could he convince me? Easily. Does asserting it to be scientific make it so? No.
> It turns out there is a very simple explanation for this. There are other constellations of chemicals in these concoctions which, in concert create an altogether particular and unique effect.
The simple explanation is 'Placebo Effect'. Don't ignore that, because it's powerful and poorly understood.
> Rofecoxib (better known as Vioxx) has an established LD50. For mice it is 300mg/kg, for rabbits it is 3.2g/kg, and for rats it is 980mg/kg [2]. But you know what? Vioxx exacerbated heart disease for at least thousands of people and should have been recalled years earlier than 2004[1]. An established LD50 does not mean a drug is safe.
That's exactly what the author is saying. Be sceptical about information presented to you. Ask questions. Don't blindly accept advice from anyone. A side effect of this is that you have to ask questions of people able to answer; you have to get advice from people trained and experienced enough to give it.
Yes, because that explains why rhino horn is so great... For every traditional medicine that has value, there are a dozen that are complete quackery and to ignore those is to fall victim to confirmation bias. Still, I liked your overall points, but they can be taken too far. The FDA is certainly a good thing, albeit flawed.
1) You say that the bias the mainstream medical establishment is a bigger travesty than chemophobia. This is not an unreasonable hypothesis but if we're going to compare them we need to have some idea of their size or import. This strikes me as requiring some rigorous study so I am skeptical of any estimates without some sort of backing. More importantly to me, why is it one or the other? Maybe they are both problems.
2) When combining chemicals the effects may certainly be different than when taken separately, but is the difference always beneficial?
"The hope, then, is that when taking something more "natural" as opposed to man-made is that that natural product will inherently contain a wider variety of compounds that taken together create a more potent, but gentle effect on the patient."
I think this is optimistic.
3) "... so many people have taken natural products for hundreds of years without ill-effect ..." How do you know they have taken them without ill-effect? Even with rigorous clinical studies and modern statistical methods this can be difficult. I'm not saying no useful knowledge has been gleaned this way, but I would think that it would obtained much less efficiently. It's only the sheer length of time that has resulted in some useful outcomes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U
(Tim Minchin's "Storm")
"Alternative Medicine has, by definition, not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. You know what we call alternative medicine that works? Medicine."
Fear of ingesting synthesized chemicals in quantities to which our species has not been exposed during its evolution? Count me in, with the obvious rational disclaimers.
What about tea and coffee? Or beer and wine? Or tomatoes? Or capsaicin?
Why is fear justified? Isn't the appropriate response reason and critical thinking? FDA approved drugs have been extensively field tested as well. And many "dangerous" chemicals are actually safer than, say, wine.
You're just trying to justify your fear of the unfamiliar. It's parochial and small-minded. Do you think that the people who discovered tea, beer, tomatoes, and cheese thought that way? Imagine how much smaller and less interesting our lives would be today if these sorts of fears had gripped our ancestors, and how much smaller our future will be if we allow them free reign today.
Both extensively tested, although antibiotics are interesting because they created drug-resistant strains. Which shows that it is rational to be on the lookout for unexpected bad effects of new things in general.
> Why is fear justified? Isn't the appropriate response reason and critical thinking?
Never stated it's one or the other. Fear of ill effects is what makes us do the whole critical evaluation, which is good.
> You're just trying to justify your fear of the unfamiliar.
I'm afraid you have read from my comments something that wasn't there at all. "Fear until reasonably tested" = rational. "Fear that makes one ignore all evidence" = obviously irrational.
> Do you think that the people who discovered tea, beer, tomatoes, and cheese thought that way?
They took the risk and won - good for us. I'm just against calling their fellow tribesmen (or countrymen) irrational, especially those who already knew about death caps & similar.
This line of argument is a quasi-religious appeal to authority.
Evolution does not have our best interests at heart, and it did not design us to be optimal machines. It did not get rid of cancer, for example, and for that reason quite a few people are happy to ingest synthesized chemicals that help preserve their lives.
Don’t Take Medical Advice From the Slate Magazine either. Research all you want but call a doctor in the end.
Which is the point of this article.
Since people have a bias for the "natural" it is hard to have any sort of a conversation about what chemicals might be good for you that don't occur naturally. And, people are unduly scared of "artificial" chemicals while turning a blind eye toward the dangers than many "natural" chemicals have.
Inclination toward "natural" makes a lot of sense as an evolved bias. Doubtless, it kept our ancestors alive. But our bodies don't have any sort of magical scanner to detect whether something is natural or not, they simply reacts in mixed ways. To us, some of those reactions are positive or negative, even for the same chemical.