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Dort_Owl [they/them, any]
Science"Capitalism charging a fortune to cure you? With stuff that has scary side effects?"
"Have no fear! Now you can buy a bunch of shit that doesn't work, from us! We're also unregulated as fuck so who knows if this stuff messes up your kidneys."
The worst thing, and anyone who had parents who fell for these scams growing up will know this, is parents who will try to 'cure' their neurodivergent kids with rat butt herb or whatever. Have fun spending your formative years incorrectly medicated!
Sure, yes I know there are natural medicines that work for certain things. But the industry as a whole is so gross and predatory. Every so often they'll 'discover' some ancient remedy so they have something new to market. Selling crystals and sage to very ill people who need real treatment. Exploiting sick people who are desperate for a cure is low as hell and I'm surprised (but not surprised) that they can just sell things that do not do the thing they say they do.
On top of that I'm so tired of people telling me "oh I know someone who was cures of that by doing x thing" god forbid there is a new diet fed.
I have done everything I have supposed to. I have eaten right, exercised, etc. Some how I still have disabilities! Who knew!
Whatever real and purported benefits are more than matched by the amounts of lead and arsenic laced within them.
if a natural medicine works, they'll extract it, package it and sell it as medicine. i don't know why people are so hostile against modern medicine, "it's chemicals" "it's a jewish plot" "it's a conspiracy to take away the real stuff that works so we can keep being sick". just take the damn pill you overgrown baby.
My partner used to use Holistic medicine til I pointed out it was just cult stuff and was just the vibes of whatever medicine was on the label.
crystals and sage
don't look up how they're sourced
Oh Lordy, when I was hanging out with hippies they would go ‘mining’ for crystals which turned out was just finding beautiful natural crystal formations and destroying them. So you can act like it’s sacred and sell it. Gross. Pretty much the same with sage.
My wife used to work at a local grocery store that had a big "health" section full of the weirdest root extract and therapeutic bullshit you've ever seen. What used to drive me crazy is when she told me about customers would come in and ask random workers if said product was "good to use" on whatever condition they had. Not that they wanted to seek the advice of a medical professional but that they just wanted confirmation for the ridiculous shit they already believed.
Did they at least go to the deli section? Pigs are so anatomically close to humans that I assume butchers must have some insights.
Asked my mom recently about a time I was sick as a child and my dad was giving me antibiotics and appearantly she didn't know that and he was sneaking me real medicine while she was committed to treat me with homeopathics.
You ever notice how every new natural miracle cure works on a dozen unrelated symptoms, but they're all the same slate of things you have to measure subjectively and could convince yourself you got better if you really wanted to believe, and not really visible stuff like a runny nose?
Getting south american jungle snuff called hapeh forcefully blown through a pipe into my sinuses has given me relief I've never had in 25 years of major sinus problems
On the other hand every functional medicine doctor I've interacted with felt like a scam
I'm fairly confident that you experienced relief due to vasocontriction and nothing fancy or mysterious. There are vasocontricting drugs but they are not prescribed for chronic issues because they cause tissue to atrophy eventually and that is bad :(
Not the full story though. Ever since COVID I was leaking slime out of my nose so bad I would need to carry a bath towel with me every where everyday to lap it all up. After hapeh no more slime, even when I don't do hapeh.
Nasal decongestants are just topical vasocontrictors. I don't know how much more effective tobacco would be than pseudoephedrine
Most are, some I think reduce mucus formation through paths other than "no blood for you". Idk there are a lot of drugs out there and I am merely 3 rats in a trench coat with an interest in harm reduction.
Nicotine is a pretty powerful vasocontrictor and topically applied to a mucus membrane would be a very potent dose. I suspect that like using cocaine or speed for the purpose though you'd cause enough damage to make the issue worse long-term.
I don't know any non vasoconstrictor nasal decongestant. Except like saline.
steroids?
Fair point. Tobacco likely isnt gonna work through those pathways though.
"Functional medicine" is just natural medicine woo repackaged to doctors.
natural medicines that work are just medicine. Usually crude extracts or raw biological material is disfavoured due to potential for side effects, difficulty dosing, or allergy potential.
Sometimes stuff just isn't investigated but mostly when that happens it's because there is already a pretty effective treatment
edit: to be clear I think it's really cool when people do use less industrialised forms of medicine to meet unmet needs and I think the structure in which medicine is often practiced is arse and harmful. Just don't reject science, which is cool and awesome, because doctors often suck. Doctors sucked before science, it's not a knowledge problem.
Yup, just because willow bark contains aspirin doesn't mean you should choose it over actual fucking aspirin
Berberine is a good example of your second point though. It has a similar effect on blood sugar to medications like Metformin, but isn't super well researched.
You mean well but the willowbark is misinformation. It contains salacilic acid, which is the pain relieving drug. However it damages the stomach and can cause ulcers.
Aspirin is acetilesalacilic acid, the acetile group is cleaved off the useful drug primarily after the stomach which makes it a much much safer thing to take.
Yep. We also don't really understand how paracetamol works beyond knowing it does work and has very few side effects.
Really? I thought it was known that it acts as a cox-2 inhibitor selectively in the CNS?
An excellent deep dive on this is done in the "This podcast will kill you" podcast (episode 120). There are a few main theories on why but generally we don't really know much at all about its mode (or modes) of action.
It has an active metabolite AM-404 that acts via cannabinoid receptors to reduce pain and fever as well. AFAIK the COX-2 inhibition is only relevant in non-human species. But AM-404 doesn't explain how it works completely, either. We're forever going to be trying to explain how these things work by measuring what we're able to measure, which doesn't mean much considering how much we don't know and how much we don't know that we don't know.
With very few exceptions we have no idea why anything acting on the CNS does what it does. We can describe what or how it affects this system or receptor or whatever, but you get into the weeds a little bit and it's all basically magic.
