To say that the "alternative medicine" and conspiracy theorists about Western medicine are dangerous to society?

Yes of course but that's different than someone individually choosing to treat their disease in an alternative way and their so called "friends" practically revelling in saying "told you so" now they're seriously ill or people saying "they're just taking themselves out of the gene pool". And it's not like anyone knows what the alternative would be if they used conventional medicine-no one has a crystal ball.

Based on what? Mine is based on proper studies. Yours is based on the 6th form debating classic, “The Oxford English Dictionary defines placebo as…”

It has physical effects. You are wrong. Just own it. It’s an interesting and counterintuitive fact.

We are a fully vaxed family and I completely respect modern medicine. However, I would argue that our reliance on modern medicine can be more dangerous than not believing in it at all. Most modern illnesses are completely preventable and could be cured by a healthy diet and active lifestyle. However it is easier to carry on eating chips and demanding medicine from the doctor which just treats symptoms without ever looking at a cause. There has to be a balance.

Not wrong - read my post properly

LOL. This is garbage (that you’ve no doubt lifted from somewhere else).

You are just as ill-informed as the people you’re on here ranting about. Take a break.

Ooo my bad thought she did. Even so she got her treatment.

"On one video call, Chantelle says, Paloma said she had a new lump in her armpit, and her mother had told her it meant that the cancer was going out of her body"

How?!

We're going through an anti-intellectual period, it happens every so often in any society. You'd have to ask a sociologist why it's happening (or chatgpt).

Also wrong. The placebo effect can have measurable physical effects.

‘By definition’ is the same as ‘common sense’. SCIENCE people! Measure it and see. People did and it does.

I did try acupuncture once.
But then I returned home to find my voodoo doll had died so won’t be trying that again.

Your link doesn’t work for me but by definition, a placebo has no actual effect. So any positive outcome maybe psychological (very unlikely for serious disease), natural course of the disease or from some other external effect.

I understand how thalidomide etc can and does cause distrust. However, that doesn’t make herbal and alternative medicines more trustworthy or better. Rigorously tested medicines and treatments will still be far far far safer and more effective than alternative medicines, which are not tested for effective side let alone side effects etc.

The strange thing about complementary and alternative medicine is that some people choose to believe it's both ineffective and dangerous, it is essentially a mirror to the anti-vaxxer's argument. A more reasoned argument would be to go through each treatment and research whether it is effective or not. A real problem is that natural products such as herbs cannot legally be patented so there is no money to be made in researching them. There is so much money to be made in pharmaceutical treatments for common illnesses... But if you have a rare disease then its not profitable to treat your disease, so alternatives do have their place.

Sorry but you are just as ill informed as the people you are talking about.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/tu/facts/

Some herbal medicines are highly effective (peer-reviewed, double blind, Nobel prize, meta study effective) with fewer side-effects in many cases. All sorts of western medicine started as ‘herbal’ medicines.

Scientific method matters. And homeopathy doesn’t pass. But many herbal and TCM medicines absolutely do. And the example I referenced above, from TCM, addresses malaria, a field that is underfunded and ignored because it’s black and brown people dying. Tu YouYou is a heroine.

Honey is used to treat wounds within GP practices and the NHS.

That's right, she didn't have chemo.

My son actually only had surgery the first time he had NHL because he had some complications due to where his tumour was located and was too unwell for chemotherapy but for him it did come back 4 months later and thankfully was able to have it then.

Exactly.

It baffles me how people actually think herbal treatments work in the body if they are not chemical reactions.

I don’t think the mum did have chemo. I think she had a mastectomy which removed the tumour and was recommended chemo & radiation to prevent recurrence. It was that she turned down in favour of alternative therapies. She basically reduced her chances of staying in remission, took a gamble on it which paid off and then claimed that the alternative therapies had cured her.
Which is entirely different to not treating a mostly curable form of cancer at all. It’s a horrific story.

This sums it up nicely. They're welcome to remove themselves from the gene pool with their 'beliefs'.

I think it's really important to debunk the quacks and the quackery. These people are attention seeking and dangerous.

I see many posts here on food/ daily diet topics where people use the word 'chemicals' in terror, as if these things are all alien and universally toxic. I roll my eyes. It's easy to spot the poorly educated.

People castigate Americans for voting for trump but I strongly suspect if he were to stand for election in the UK, he'd win a seat and probably end up leading a political party to a majority in Parliament.

The measles outbreak in the US is worrying:
archive.is/1vL8M

I've lost a couple of previously very sensible, highly educated and intelligent friends to medical conspiracy. I'm pretty disturbed by how rapidly this has spread.

Oh and the most senior health official in the US (RFK) has also just fired all the scientists from the vaccine advisory board, replacing them with tin hat types. So this sort of shit is about to get a lot worse.

I don't know what the solution is but science needs to fight back, big time.

Western medicine is amazing. All my family are fully vaxxed and I have lots of loved ones who wouldn't be here if it weren't for the miracle of modern medicine. We have come to take it for granted.

That said, for some there is an over reliance on it. There have been lots of studies on the overuse and misuse of antibiotics. Sometimes diet and exercise is the answer. Also while many herbal remedies are placebos, placebos work and genuinely can improve health outcomes (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513296/) so as long as they are being used for things that won't kill you, like the common cold then I'm all for it.

I know some people who are very anti modern medicine and I don't believe calling them nutters, patronising them, calling them stupid is helpful. They are listening to deeply persuasive people who skillfully play on fears and warp facts. There absolutely have been terrible things with modern medicine ie Thalidomide. We've also had the infected blood scandal, we know doctors in America were bribed to prescribe addictive opioids off label as pain killers leading to addiction and ODs and we know doctors often ignore women's pain and perform treatments without appropriate pain killers.

Now, many people in my family are in the medical professional, I see the amazing work they do and as I said I thank god on my knees for western medicine but there have been scandals so dismissing and belittling people who are opposed won't do any good. Listening to why they feel this way and compassionate communication is the way forward.

There was a BBC article recently about a young woman whose mother heavily influenced her to refuse chemo, resulting in the woman's death when her cancer had an 80% chance of cure with chemo. This mother's two sons are now estranged from her, and angry. She's an online influencer and former NHS nurse.

YABU.

Surely it's up to people themselves whether they want conventional treatment or not?

An exception to this might be where a child has a high chance of survival, but the parents refuse life-saving treatment. In that situation, it is wise to get the courts involved.

I think you are very judgemental in how you are coming across. A special place in hell for the "loon" who persuaded your son off his meds is an awful thing to think or say about someone who was probably as mentally ill as he was.

I mean it’s their own fault why so many of these stupid people die. I can’t remember the case but there was a woman in America that started a cult, saying she could cure cancer and was Jesus reborn she ended up getting cancer and died. Her body was found mumified.