Barbrae said:
Are you for herbal medicine?
absolutely
Oh dear, maybe I'm on Barb's back again? Didn't notice you complaining when I tried to get Bill off your back about the homooepathic sleeping pills thing, Barb - I shouldn't have bothered, really.
OK, you're in favour of herbal remedies. And homoeopathy, as we know. You also believe that homoeopathy should be regulated.
Now, think about it this way. The reason you can find all these big scary numbers about adverse reactions to real medicine is that real medicine
is regulated. Adverse reactions must be reported and collated. (There's also Prester John's point about the reason some deaths get put down to an adverse reaction when that isn't really the case, also the point of the enormous numbers of patients being treated with real medicine compared to the small hobby that homoeopathy and herbalism consist of.)
If you don't regulate, you don't know. So you don't know what adverse reactions to herbal remedies might be going on, though from the cases highlighted on this thread I wouldn't be too confident about taking anything. And indeed, Barb, it was you yourself why cautioned the original poster in the homoeopathic pills thread to have a full resuscitation and ER team handy if he decided to take a whole bottle of these alleged "sleeping pills" - that doesn't sound like the advice of someone who has confidence to me.
Now we may speculate that there ain't much can go wrong from taking a true homoeopathic product. But that's because
we don't believe that these products are capable of having any physiological effect on the body. If you believe they can, you must also believe that they are capable of having a harmful effect - and indeed we read all about aggravations and "healing crises" and unwanted proving effects in the replies on H'pathy. All subject to no reporting and no recirding and no statistics.
So, why are you so happy to consume and defend and promote these products when they
aren't regulated in any way? How can you possibly know there isn't an even bigger can of worms there than there is for real medicine, on a case-for-case basis?
We're back here to the feather and the chain saw. A chain saw is dangerous, we all agree. But if you have to cut down a tree, you need to use it. There's not much point saying, chain saws are dangerous, here, use this nice safe feather. (If indeed homoeopathy is safe, something for which we have no evidence.)
Real medicine is, in the main, safe like a scalpel. You need to know what you're doing, and be very careful, and even then sometimes things just don't pan out the way you intended and sometimes real accidents happen. But the solution is to use the scalpel more safely, and only when it's necessary, not to ban scaplels.
Real medicine tries, with more and more testing and more and more regulation, to balance risk and benefit to come out as ahead of the game as it's possible to be. Nothing's perfect, but as several people have said, you have to look at the amount of good that has been done and the millions of people getting real benefit to set agaist the times when things do go wrong (which aren't nearly as often as you can interpret the statistics to imply).
I submit that it's illogical to say, I believe homoeopathy (and presumably herbal remedies) should be regulated, but then in the face of the fact that they aren't regulated, to continue to prefer them to real medicine where you can at least find out what the recorded adverse incidents actually
are for anything you might be prescribed.
Rolfe.
) so people should visit the doctor less often. According to you. Who will prescribe these medications? How will people know if they're allowed to use it? Who will they visit if they have adverse reactions?
