“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.
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.
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.
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!
I will say, I don’t think people should blame people who get caught up in this stuff. I have been to so many doctors’ offices that i’ve got more pictures of what my insides look like than outside, and I’m very lucky that I’ve had some good doctors in my life to know that they are not all shit and you have to stand up for yourself and keep looking to find good ones.
Depending upon area and circumstances, there are many people who don’t get good doctors. Hell, I had an appointment today and despite my current doctor being absolutely amazing, I still have horrible anxiety going to doctors’ offices anymore, cause i’m so used to it turning into a shit show of some asshole telling me that my pain isn’t real.
God forbid you attach intersectionality to it. You can walk into a room and if you have a shit bigoted doctor you are going to get “I hate you as a person” disorder.
The natural health industry is a byproduct of this. Very much a they sell us the poison and then sell us more poison and claim it’s a cure. A lot of people are desperate and have nothing else and are grasping at anything.
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?
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.
Medical science is pretty good, really. Implementations of it under capitalism fucking suck. But it’s wild how much progress has been made on various cancers and whatnot.
Also, most modern medicine is natural, a large portion of it is just trying to help the immune system do its job.
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!
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.
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.
Whatever real and purported benefits are more than matched by the amounts of lead and arsenic laced within them.
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.
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 :(
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.
Nicotine is only one component of hapeh. Depending on the blend it’s also made with special types of ground up flowers, barks, herbs. Different blends for different purposes and stages of the process
I don’t know any non vasoconstrictor nasal decongestant. Except like saline.
steroids?
Fair point. Tobacco likely isnt gonna work through those pathways though.
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.
A problem when determining cause is many things get better on their own and so sometimes it looks like something cured a thing when it just relieved symptoms while the body did the rest.
It could also have broken some sort of inflammatory feedback loop by making everything settle down long enough to reset, or damaged mucus producing organs enough to just stop the problem longer term.
I was ruthlessly sick for the better part of seven years and then when I got abruptly well after doing hapeh everyday for a couple of weeks I’m sure it was just my body naturally healing at the same time for some other unrelated reason /s
It could also have broken some sort of inflammatory feedback loop by making everything settle down long enough to reset, or damaged mucus producing organs enough to just stop the problem longer term.
This is literally what “cure” meant in the context of my comment. Almost verbatim what my medicine woman told me before we started
“Functional medicine” is just natural medicine woo repackaged to doctors.
