“Natural”. It’s thrown around every day on television and in magazines and… well, on Oprah and the like quite a lot. Mostly it’s used as a thinly veiled epithet aimed at the pharmaceutical industry. While I have no problem with bashing corporations who look more fondly on profits than on people, that does not, then, somehow make pharmaceuticals themselves evil or un-natural. We are, after all, talking about science once we get past the money-making aspect. But a lot of advocates of so-called ‘alternative medicine’ — a misnomer if there ever was one - It’s a bit like calling a cat and ‘alternative dog’ — would have you believe that they have a better way to ‘wellness’ and health. “Natural” remedies/cures/treatments/etc.
WHAT IS NATURAL?
Aspirin is a pharmaceutical. You may not have to have a prescription for it, but it certainly isn’t something you yank from the ground and chew on for pain relief. Although it once was. What we know as aspirin now came about from people chewing on willow bark for the salicylic acid it contained; more or less of it depending on the plant itself and local conditions. But unlike that bark, the aspirin we buy down at the corner shop is not hit or miss. We know exactly how much acetylsalicylic acid is in it. Because that’s how pharmaceuticals work.
We extract the thing that is beneficial (or, if we can just make it from its ‘natural’ component compounds, all the better) and we carefully study its effect on whatever it is it’s meant to treat. From that we work out dosages that make it as safe and effective as possible. We get rid of the pure guessing game that handing someone a bundle of bark and saying, “Chew on this” carries with it.
CHEW ON THIS
History is rife with medicinal treatments found in the natural world. Some good, some questionable. Quinine, used to tackled deadly Malaria, came from another bark called Cinchona. The ‘natural’ Chinese remedy for colds and other ills made from Ephedra sinica got its kick from the ephedrine and pseudoephedrine it contained. You might recognize pseudoephedrine from many modern cold remedies. We just don’t have to boil a bunch of grass to get the benefit any longer, we use accurate dosing based on years of studying its effect. Which is good, since too much can kill you, and ‘a handful’ is far from adequate as a unit of measure. You all know where opium comes from, so I won’t belabor it. But it’s good example of good and bad, as well as a natural thing which led us to understand a whole family of drugs, opioids, which help people endure excruciating pain every day.
I don’t know about you, but the idea of tossing a cancer patient a cup of poppy seeds is not my idea of smart health care. Wait, how much is in a cup? See, what I mean? Yet we’re often bullied by proponents of all manner of armchair medicine to do just that with other drugs and supplements.
IT’S NOT SPARTA
This is pharmaceutics. We find something that helps and make it usable in a safe known form and dosage. It’s not evil. It’s not even sinister. If water is produced using condensation in a machine is it not still water? And if salicylic acid works pretty good, but acetylsalicylic acid works better, and we can simply create that in a lab, shouldn’t we? That it didn’t come from a wad of bark makes no difference in how it works. The drug is the same no matter how it got there.
And we are talking about drugs here. Something put into your body to alter, fix, enhance, improve, heal, etc. some aspect of your body. Just because it came from the supermarket and just because an alternative medicine practitioner recommended it doesn’t make St. John’s Wort any less a drug. And, once again, too much of it can also make you ill. Do not fall pray to the mistaken belief that ‘natural’ also means ‘totally safe’. The FDA has listed many so-called natural remedies which are in fact harmful. Just look at Liqiang 4. Touted as a wonderful, natural, ancient Chinese weight loss (among other claims) remedy, the FDA has found it necessary to warn consumers that… well… it can kill you.
WAIT A MINUTE…
If only we had a discipline which studied the effects of compounds and then sorted out what a safe dosage was and made that available to us… in, say… pills or elixirs…
Pharmaceutics. Non-evil. Non-unnatural.
Giving you a handful of bark is no guarantee for pain relief. And there’s certainly no guarantee that you’re not about to cause yourself further harm, rather than good. So-called ‘natural’ drugs are no good for you if you take too much or in conjunction with another contraindicated drug. And most often the person prescribing the remedy has been handed down this information like a recipe. You use this much because that’s how much it says to use. Now really, does that seem rational to you when you put your brain on the case?
Telling you to flush your body with juice for 6 days to somehow rid your body of ‘toxins’ (does anyone ever check to see if you actually have any of these toxins in you???), that sounds all well and good. And safe. I mean, it’s just juice, right? But did your practitioner measure your overall body pH? It’s rather important, that. And ‘just juice’ contains a lot of water and acids and sodium and other things which, in such large quantities, can dramatically alter your pH. Did they ask if you take any other medications or have heart problems? Are your protein levels sufficient to tide you over? In short, did they try to insure that you don’t damage yourself rather than help?
On a side note… Toxins indeed. We have a liver for that, thank you very much. And it’s really damned good at its job, too. No amount of juice is going to do the job of your natural liver. Take that, you charlatans. And if, by fate, your liver is damaged, an onslaught of juice through your gut is not going to be doing you any favours. Seriously.
DISTILLED DOWN
To live in the modern world we need to engage our brains. At all times. And they’re very well suited for just that! The promises of science are not out of the grasp of the general public. Science surrounds us. It’s a part of our world. You’re reading this right now on a machine whose sheer power was un-dreamed of by early computing pioneers. Gigaflops? Gigabytes? Terabytes? Heavens! So falling for old-world superstition is beneath you and your big brain. Pharmaceutics is exactly the sort of thing that naturally, pardon the pun, follows on from the discovery of real-world remedies. It’s not un-natural at all. The more we know about what we’re putting in our bodies, the better idea we have about what the outcome will be.
It’s a natural progression from figuring out what plants help certain ailments to figuring out what it is in the plant that did the work and distilling that part out for better use. We live longer and healthier than ever before . And we do so in a world which grows more and more inhospitable to us each day. Overpoulation, pollution, ozone holes… all of this would have killed us if we hadn’t used our brains to move past simply chewing on a piece of bark. The list of diseases that would have culled our populations by now is large. Instead, we use our brains to find out what it is in some bark that sometimes helps us, and we make it better, more available and more (or less) potent as needed. We discover methods for extending our lives, for keeping us healthy in a repeatable, describable way. We pass that knowledge and research along to others so they can live better too. And it’s science that gets us there, not superstition or ancient secrets or trying to make people fear medicine or selling snake oil on TV. Science.
After all, our predecessors, who lived an ‘all natural’ life and had access to all this ‘ancient wisdom’ as well, died a hell of a lot younger than we will. We have science and modern medicine on our side. They did not. And I, for one, am greatly appreciative of this.
Cross-posted at http://everydayskeptics.com
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