So my mother asks me about helping her find one of her herbal remedies online as the shop she normally buys from has stopped selling it.
She'd been told that Goldenseal Root wasn't available because some government agency is <something conspiratorial>
So I thought I'd wiki it - looks like it's not on sale because it's an endangered species.
a) Because 60 million plants are harvested each year and none planted
b) Because Mining operations in its habitat have:
1) no legal rights to transplant the plants to another location
2) no penalty for destroying it to get at the minerals they're mining...
Hmm not so much a conspiracy as the weirdy beardy types making a species extinct because it's profitable.
Reading on.
There's no studies that show it has any positive effects.
There ARE studies that suggest there may be a level of toxicity to it
Apparently it's used to aid digestion, boost the immune system, cure cancer, anti inflamatory and anti septic
It might cause diarrhea, and at least one component might cause death.
So, after reading that it does nothing good, that it might harm or kill you, after reading that it's an endangered species - does that put her off?
No.
So ingrained is the idea that something that grows in the ground is good for you and that when she's not taken it she got a cold, and so taken with all the BS she still still wants some.
Looking online for it, and every website that sells the stuff seems to claim different positive effects. I'm pretty sure that if I checked enough sites I'd find they're getting imaginative with the bullshit "rub it on a duck to cure athletes foot" or "shove it up a pony to get golden eggs"
Why are these people allowed to prey upon the gullible? Many of the sites selling this crap also sell Acai which has been sufficiently debunked that saying it's anything other than fruit is likely outright fraud... what happened to not being allowed to make claims of a product that have no factual basis?
Comments
If a mineral can act like a powerful drug, why not a herb?
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the thing is, if someone made some modern pharma-derived medicine, and then just started selling it, without testing, claiming that it fixes illness X, then everyone would be very unhappy that efficacy, side effects and toxicity has not been proved. If it's some plant-extract, people think everything is happy mother nature doing her thing, no problems, but of course, any garden has plenty of things that can kill you, mother nature is not always kind, and taking unproven medicines from any source carries risk, and not just the risk that it doesn't do the good it claims
Whilst some medics are very resistant to change, as a whole they are pretty keen to use any treatment that can be proven to work - they use leechs and maggots even, but there is a bit of a conspiracy-theory-based idea that modern medicine, which we are so lucky to have, is not as good as some traditional stuff that was never scientifically proven to work.
Generally, "alternative" medicine means "unproven, non-scientific" medicine, and whilst placebos can help sometimes when no clear cure is available, I am worried about the stories I hear that people are presenting themselves to the NHS with way more advanced cancer than in the past because they have been self-medicating with traditional medicines instead of seeking help for the NHS
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Offset "(Emp) - a little heavy on the hyperbole."
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heh
yes, although I occasionally watch Loose women, it's often a bit like rubbernecking at a crash on the motorway. I always wonder what a backlash there would be if a bunch of similar blokes spent an hour mulling over the world on TV every afternoon (well actually you could just stream video from a pub). Top gear without cars is probably what it would feel like
Intelligence variation is roughly symmetrical, so sadly as well as the top 10%-20% for intelligence, there comes a bottom 10%-20%, and people are rarely brave enough to discuss the struggle those people have with understanding the complexity thrown at them.
Having said that, there are lot of people who are around average intelligence or better who believe all sort of bizarre stuff. For example, that Gillian McKeith was a good example of someone masquerading as a scientist helping people. She deserves plenty of bad karma