The Glade 4.0

GRRAAAAAIIIIIIIINNNNNSSS

Obligatory:

I think you can pretty much pin the longer life expectancy on (a) antibiotics and understanding infection, and (b) surgical technique.

Otherwise, most of those folk remedies are exactly where most of our modern medicines came from, and it's still a common practice in the industry to scour old herbal medicine books and lore to find new medicinal compounds.

And yes, I'm crunchy. I spend my day working on developing new chemical compounds to treat illnesses, and as such, I've come to realize that this barrier most people have between "real medicine" and natural medicine is just a lack of understanding of what exactly medicine is.

Whether you eat it, rub it on your skin, or buy it at the drug store, it's a chemical compound that helps the other chemicals in your body function. This includes nutrition as a *huge* component, as well as other treatments for treating imbalances left genetically or otherwise.

And since the bar is so, so low for a drug to get approved as "effective", there are lots of pharmaceutical products out there that are marginally to unnoticably effective to the average person- take tamiflu or aciclovir. They shorten the progression of their respective viruses (flu and herpes) by somewhere around 8-10 hours. So instead of having the flu for 8 days, you'll have it for 7 1/2 days. It's effective over a placebo, but not something that most people will notice in practical use.

Yet it gets prescribed all the freaking time.

And antibiotics? Most of the time you don't need those. Most of the time it's a heck of a lot healthier for you to stimulate your immune system to get rid of things. Yet people pop them like candy for the most minor infections, which in turn lead to huge spreads of things like MRSA and company.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

A bit testy are we?

If your mother was on blood pressure meds she should never have taken a folk remedy without talking to her doctor first.

As far as your other questions, you will notice that I never said everyone should go back to using only folk remedies. I choose to use certain herbal/folk remedies because it's my body and I prefer not to suffer through the side effects of certain drugs that doctors commonly prescribe.

YMMV

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

Also, with the blood pressure meds, evaluation by the FDA won't stop drug-drug interactions, which are exceptionally common.

Did your mother tell the doctor that prescribed her the blood pressure medicine that she was taking a folk remedy as well?

The biggest problem with people taking/using herbal supplements and folk remedies is that they don't see them as medicine, and so they don't tell their doctor/pharmacist that they're taking them. Which can lead to overdoses (if you're doubling up on herbal and pharmaceutical compounds with the same effects) or underdoses (if you're taking something that interacts with or effects the metabolism of a drug).

Heck, taking blood pressure medicines along with certain *foods* renders them uneffective, but you don't see grapefruit juice bottles putting on a warning.

And I have a pharmaceutical textbook full of amazingly useful folk remedies, including a number for blood pressure that are equally effective as many on the market.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

The problem here is education, a lot of the time, self education. There is a huge difference between getting your information from a reputable text book on active ingredients with a knowledge on the needed manufacturing practice to extract said ingredient, vs something you google on the internet, and rooting (*giggle*) around your back yard for something similar.
There's nothing wrong with the "crunchy" movement, what is wrong is the amount of wrong knowledge which people pass off as the truth.

I wouldn't try to fix my car, or drive my own plane. I wouldn't do my own taxes and expect the same returns. I wouldn't build my own house. I leave the things I'm not a pro in to the professional, same way if I have a serious medical condition. It's silly to think you're a pro (unless you are a trained that way), especially to work on something as important as your body.

Haha, maybe that's the difference.

I love to do my own car work, want to get my pilots license, do my own taxes, and plan on building my own house when I graduate and choose a place to settle down.

There's a difference between needing to be a professional and being a knowledgeable amateur. But I completely agree that people get way too much (mis)information offline and from unreliable sources.

Part of being a knowledgeable amateur is knowing when you need to call a professional.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Coupled with being your own best advocate, this is wisdom well beyond your years.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Sometimes it's hard to fit everything in, when you just know there are things you are not good at.



This though is something most people fail to grasp.

I'm pretty crunchy, but the extremists make me scratch my head and wonder.