Penn & Teller on Alternative Medicine

gruk said:
No, because "natural meds" are of very varying quality and potency. Take salicylic acid (the compound that was, eventually, stabilised and synthezised as acetylic salicylic acid and sold under a variety of brand names, including Aspirin) as a perfect example. It's a slightly improved natural substance, but as opposed to the tree bark the original remedy comes from, a lab-produced substance has the sam strength today as it did 10 years ago. An extract made from bark from tree 1 is most probably NOT of the same potency as that made from the same sort of tree only a mile away.

This causes BIG problems for anyone wanting to deliver a consistent dosage.

Also, bear in mind that at least some "natural remedies" have had their efficiency boosted by the inclusion of pharmaceutical substances (read the ingredients list, you may be surprised).
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Aspirin is a great counter example to so many fallacious alt-med claims. By the middle of the 19th century the sciences of chemistry and medicine had advanced sufficiently that pharmaceutical companies were actively screening natural substances for therapeutic agents. When German chemists isolated salicylic acid from willow bark, they demonstrated that it does have anlagesic properties. But they also showed that it is very poorly absorbed from the stomach and it is a severe stomach irritant (a serious SIDE EFFECT OF A NATURAL COMPOUND) even when taken in its "natural" state as willow bark tea. Those clever chemists tried a few tricks they knew about and soon discovered that adding an acetate group created a compound that is absorbed hundreds of times faster than the natural ingredient with far less stomach irritation. The "synthetic" form is far more effective with far fewer side effects than the natural form.

But there's more. The new compound was easily synthesized, which meant it could be offered relatively cheaply in a pure and highly effective form. Furthermore it was patented and made lots of money for Bayer. When the patent expired dozens of other companies began producing it and selling it AT A PROFIT, yet another counter to the alt-med lie that companies cannot profit from selling drugs that can't be patented (as if the profits made by the nutritional supplement companies wasn't enough to debunk that lie).

It's also a lie that natural compounds can't be patented. For example, a pharamaceutical company has patented "H51", a natural extract from hoodia, as an appetite suppressant. Unfortunately hoodia is a rare and endangered plant and H51 is too complex to produce economically via chemical synthesis (tho it may eventually be produced by genetic manipulation). That doesn't stop greedy profit driven supplement companies from selling hoodia products with either a different species of hoodia or a dosage about 100 times lower than the dose used by native populations for appetite suppression. They all repeat the claim that it has been used for hundreds of years as a natural appetite suppressant, but some how they all forget to mention that the dosage in their products is very much lower than these people typically use.

Some people in the supplement business are greedy unethical cads. Some supplement companies have been discovered secretly adding prescription drugs to their "natural" products. Some "natural" products, when analyzed, have been found to not contain the ingredients they say they do. And at least one supplement company is under indictment for lying to the FDA about reports of adverse reactions (including deaths) from their "natural" products. Despite those deaths, some people still believe that "natural" products don't have side effects...
 
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Excuse me for getting back on the subject, but I just read through the entire thread and found something early on which I would like some help with.

On page 1 Greyman references a PDF about iatrogenic deaths which said:

- Approximately 1.24 million total patient safety incidents occurred in almost 40 million
hospitalizations in the Medicare population. These incidents were associated with $9.3 billion of
excess cost during 2002 through 2004. For the second year in a row, patient safety incidents have
increased—up from 1.14 and 1.18 million reported in HealthGrades’ First and Second Annual Patient
Safety in American Hospitals studies, respectively.

- Of the 304,702 deaths that occurred among patients who developed one or more patient
safety incidents, 250,246 were potentially preventable.
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Now, I may be misreading this, but isn't it saying that, out of 1.24 million incidents, some number of people died following that incident. BUT, I'm not seeing that the 304,702 deaths were CAUSED by the incident. All it says is that the patient later died.

This goes along with what luchog mentioned earlier - we also can't tell what percentage of these were dosage mismanagement by the patient themselves, patients managing to evade restraints resulting in fatal injuries, wet floors, etc. This figure is useless, except in that we know that the actual figure of deaths caused by doctor or hospital negligence is actually lower than that.

If this is an example of the statistics used by Amorelli and other alt-med nuts, is there any reason why we should not find their claims utterly spurious and dangerous?

By the way, does Amorelli remind anyone else of mayday/bigfig, or is it just me?
 
juryjone said:
Excuse me for getting back on the subject, but I just read through the entire thread and found something early on which I would like some help with.

On page 1 Greyman references a PDF about iatrogenic deaths which said:



Now, I may be misreading this, but isn't it saying that, out of 1.24 million incidents, some number of people died following that incident. BUT, I'm not seeing that the 304,702 deaths were CAUSED by the incident. All it says is that the patient later died.

This goes along with what luchog mentioned earlier - we also can't tell what percentage of these were dosage mismanagement by the patient themselves, patients managing to evade restraints resulting in fatal injuries, wet floors, etc. This figure is useless, except in that we know that the actual figure of deaths caused by doctor or hospital negligence is actually lower than that.

If this is an example of the statistics used by Amorelli and other alt-med nuts, is there any reason why we should not find their claims utterly spurious and dangerous?

By the way, does Amorelli remind anyone else of mayday/bigfig, or is it just me?
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Actually, the last part of your quote seems particularly applicaible:
Of the 304,702 deaths that occurred among patients who developed one or more patient
safety incidents, 250,246 were potentially preventable.
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So, of these, it seems only 250 thousand would have been preventable. Which means these are the ones that could be labelled as deaths due to doctors, at the maximum.

And out of 40 million, that's 1 in 160, or a rate of about 0.63%

Not too bad.
 
- Of the 304,702 deaths that occurred among patients who developed one or more patient
safety incidents, 250,246 were potentially preventable.
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One or more saftey incidents?

That clearly shows that at least some of these incidents weren't all that bad. Some of the patients apparently survived their respective first incidents, to have second or further incidents which then sometimes may have been fatal.

Of course, non of this should be taken lightly: Over 250,000 patients died when they didn't need to. That is tragic to say the least. But nowhere does it say that "conventional medicine" is to blame. In fact, when the deaths would have been easily preventable, my guess is that it was everything but properly administered medicine that killed them.
 
Niki said:
See, I agree with you on the comedic content of ********. It's not meant to *prove* the point. My hope is that Penn and Teller want you to think about it and do your own research into it, instead of just buying into whatever you read in the paper.
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I thought it was too bad that they gave it such a quick review. They just gave the impression that herbs were "all in your mind", which isn't completely true.

Oh, well. Maybe it'll get covered more on another episode.
 
Bradk3 said:
I just recently reread James Herriot's "All Creatures Great and Small" series about an English veterinarian practicing in Yorkshire.
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I know this is quite peripheral, but I just reread those too and I feel I should point out that James Herriot was Scottish, not English. He was from Glasgow. ;)
 
HopperUK said:
I know this is quite peripheral, but I just reread those too and I feel I should point out that James Herriot was Scottish, not English. He was from Glasgow. ;)
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Actually, he was born in Sunderland. His parents moved to Glasgow some three weeks after his birth. And, of course, lest the name mislead you, his name wasn't really James Herriot; it was James Alfred Wight.
 
Euromutt said:
Actually, he was born in Sunderland. His parents moved to Glasgow some three weeks after his birth. And, of course, lest the name mislead you, his name wasn't really James Herriot; it was James Alfred Wight.
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Since we're off the deep end OT wise, I always thought it interesting that on the TV series the actor playing Siegfried looked more like Wight, and the actor playing Herriot looked more like the real Siegfried (Donald).
 
macgyver said:
True, but his practice was in Yorkshire...
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Euromutt said:
Actually, he was born in Sunderland. His parents moved to Glasgow some three weeks after his birth. And, of course, lest the name mislead you, his name wasn't really James Herriot; it was James Alfred Wight.
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*Comes out of hiding* Ah, yes! I... knew that all along!
 
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