“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.
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 [a precursor of] 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.
Edited so that some numbnuts doesn’t go chewing tree bark to cure a hangover. You probably want to do a decoction for that anyway.
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?
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.
That’s super neat!
Really? My background is physics so I am very far from an expert here but I thought with certain things we had pretty good models for what happens in neurons. Like GABAergic agents suppress excitation etc. Translating that into effects on consciousness is difficult because of the hard problem but explaining effects on consciousness backwards (i.e. given we know what people experience, is our understanding of what the drug does consistent with that) was pretty robust I thought. At least for stuff acts on one or two of the well-characterised receptors.
So our mechanistic understanding of how some receptor signaling pathways operate is alright, but you can’t look at a molecule and predict its effects with any accuracy until you start actually giving it to people. Advances in the neurosciences haven’t given way to advances in psychopharmacology. If anything the opposite has happened since we started doing rational drug design. Brains aren’t rational things.
One example: triptans for migraines were developed as 5HT1B/1D specific agonists under the reasoning that migraines are a vascular phenomenon. It turns out that their efficacy in migraine is due to downstream effects on CGRP. Migraines aren’t a vascular phenomenon at all. Triptans are still efficacious, but not for the reasons we thought. And it could be that CGRP is just a proxy for something else, or one of multiple pathways involved in migraines. Sticking with serotonin, 5HT2A receptors are associated with the hallucinogenic experience. Activating them seems to be a precondition for an acid trip, say. Except there’s lots of 5HT2A agonists that aren’t hallucinogenic, and we don’t know why or why not. Biased agonism is in vogue right now, or was, but at least for MOR agonists it appears that “biased agonism” is an artifact of the assays used, what they’re measuring, and how they’re measuring it. If you look for it with different assays, what looked like biased agonism is just partial (unbiased) agonism. Either way: why does it make a difference? Those downstream pathways very quickly turn into black boxes, and the more we study them the less sense they make.
GABA chloride channels do lower neuronal excitability, but beyond being able to say that they raise the activation threshold of specific neurons under specific conditions we can’t generalize from that to much of anything useful. The GABAergics we use we discovered entirely by accident. Every single GABAergic that’s been trialled following rational drug design principles has been a bust. Vigabatril and tiagabine have tiny niches in the treatment of epilepsy.
Any explanation of why psychoactives do what they do is necessarily going to be post hoc based on whatever the state of the art at the time is and that’s always in flux. We don’t know what a “normal brain” looks like, or how it works (bearing in mind that “normal” here is a very fuzzy concept). We know what we know about what parts of the brain are responsible for what to the extent we do (and that’s more limited than people think, too) from studying people or animals who have had parts of their brains damaged one way or another. That can tell you that a region of the brain is usually associated with this or that, but why? I don’t think it’s possible to know that. Certainly it’s not in the way it’s popularly understood to be a tractable problem.
We’re social creatures and our experiences can’t be neatly reduced to individual neurology except in a few very specific ways. There’s a lot of assumptions baked into the neurosciences that rarely get examined (or if you examine them too closely your grant funding magically disappears). Popular understandings of how brains work, and appeals to neuroscience for literally anything else, are a reflection of material conditions and ideologies more than anything else.
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.
Cool! Thanks for the rec. I love finding out there’s way more to know about something.