alternative medicine, not as safe as some people think.

[bananaandcustard]

www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/man-died-an-hour-after-being-treated-for-peanut-allergy-26531233.html

More people will die from conventional medication than ever from alternative.

On the Channel Island Herm car accidents are virtually unheard of and no one has died in hospital on Herm for as long as anyone can remember.

Does that mean they have miracle cures

Also on conventional medicine killing more people that can also be the case if it is abused whereas you can take as many homeopathic pills as you like, worst case scenario is you will screw with your blood sugar.

Of course conventional medicine can also kill because well it has active ingredients which have an actual affect.

homeopathic pills often contain lactose, for those with intolerant symptoms are unpleasant but not life threatening. For those with ige milk allergy it can be life threatening.
Have met someone who was caught out this way with homeopathic medicine, was a swift painful way to realise that alternative doesnt always mean safe.

Homeopathy has been thoroughly disproved. An academic carried out research on the various "medicines" and from memory I think that they found that 2 of them were effective, and all the others completely ineffective. Apparently St James Wort actually works.

St John's wort is a herbal medicine I think rather than homeopathic so does have active ingredients. I know some people who do feel it has helped them.

Alternative medicine is called alternative until it can be proven it works and is safe. When that happens it is then called medicine.

This.

Alternative medicine is also not the same as complimentary therapies. Many hospices use complimentary theropies as just that, on the side of conventional medicine. The therapies do no actually act on the medical condition but can and often do make people feel better.

I know towards the end of my mum's life she was having hand massage with aromatherapy oils, I do not think this had any effect on her medical condition, I do believe it was a pleasant experience for her, something she had enjoyed when she was more concious.

It depends on what you're calling 'alternative medicine'. Some complementary and alternative medicine practices have been shown to work and are recommended by NICE and can be offered on the NHS. They are not called 'medicine' because of this though.

I have friend who has just started selling Juice Plus and apparently it can cure eczema!!! People think that just because something is 'herbal' that it is safe and many people don't realise that they can have an adverse effect if taken with prescription medicine. I am on the pill and know that its effectiveness can be reduced if taken with St John's Wort.

My dd was catching everything going when she was 7 years old because of overprescription of antibiotics on the part of the doctor, who never once showed any concern for how often she was getting sick. In desperation I took her to an acupuncturist who prescribed her some Chinese herbs and she didn't get sick for another two years.

Alternatively, your daughter at age seven ran into a number of infectious illnesses she had not encountered before and she caught them, possibly because she was a little run down or for some other reason entirely unrelated to antibiotics. Subsequently her immune system, by now working much better, and primed against those illnesses she had already experienced, kicked in, allowing her to remain well for the next two years and coincidentally occurring at the same time she received some herbal medicine which did no harm, but also had no effect.

Another alternative is that given the herbal medicine, and your obvious approval, your daughter expected to feel better, and therefore was better. It's called the placebo effect.

Your story does not prove that the medicine helped. Only that personal perception is easily fooled and that human beings tend to behave in ways that are not scientifically rational, even when they try very hard. We are hard-wired through thousands of years of evolution to place more emphasis on personal experience than we place on more scientific methods.

Igneococcus Not satire, very real, with very real followers.

Kerri Rivera

"Only that personal perception is easily fooled and that human beings tend to behave in ways that are not scientifically rational, even when they try very hard."

I don't think her story necessarily proves this either tbf.

Sorry. link is for CD autism website.

Oh dear. This is obviously a conversation of deaf people. Everyone is entrenched in their own ideas and not interested in anyone else's experience or opinion. So be it.

"Only that personal perception is easily fooled and that human beings tend to behave in ways that are not scientifically rational, even when they try very hard."

I don't think her story necessarily proves this either tbf.

Fair enough. Demonstrates or suggests then, rather than proves.

I would add that I am a vet and I am well aware that I myself am hard-wired in the same way. If I treat a patient and it works well, I am very likely to re-use the same protocol again with more certainty. I do try to ensure that I keep myself up to date and practising evidence-based medicine, but none of us are immune to this kind of thinking and many qualified medical practitioners and veterinary surgeons will not always give the most scientifically appropriate treatment but will treat based largely on personal experience.

In general it works well. That's why we are hard-wired to do it. Sometimes however it can be problematical as it leads us to draw incorrect or even unsafe conclusions.

Ugh. Natural medicine. I get all ragey when people tell me they've seen these amazing natural medicines of natural health websites, and they take every word as true. 'I read it on the Internet so it must be true!' Many people nowadays seem to have lost the ability to discern between credible evidence based science and complete and utter nonsense, just because you can read something online and it has a snazzy looking website doesn't mean it's true.

Triliteral Wouldn't it be wonderful if allopathic doctors could just sometimes have a placebo effect?

Because according to people like you, people like me are only capable of getting a placebo effect from alternative medicine, aren't we? Even if we grew up going to great allopathic doctors who cured us and our families, which I would have thought would be the perfect set up for a placebo effect.

I know differentnaemforthis I looked into it quite a bit more but at first glance I thought it might be satire. The page that I looked at first also claimed that Jim Humble developed a process that can eliminate all radioactivity, he's truly magic, Archbisphop Jim Humble.
The scary things is that she was recommended this by a Heilpraktiker who recommended it despite admitting not knowing much about it. Some other poster whose husband is a Heilpraktiker said her husband was horified when she told him about it.

Western medicine is notoriously crap at treating certain chronic illnesses. My daughter has ME/CFS, and the 9 conventional doctors we saw were completely unhelpful, and even destructive in their approach. They watched her getting worse and worse and were completely useless in dealing with 10 weeks of unexplained fever, months of extreme exhaustion, unexplained blood and discomfort in the urinary tract, etc.

The (German) private doctor we saw examined her in a completely different way, took 2 hours to analyse everything about her health history and current condition, ordered very complex "alternative" blood tests of mitochondrial function and stool sample tests of digestive function. She used nutritional therapy and herbal remedies and my daughter has dramatically improved.

Not all "alternative" therapies are stupid quackery, and Western medicine doesn't have all the answers.

Conventional doctors are good at prescribing pills for certain clear conditions and at doing operations. They are not particularly good at dealing with the underlying causes of chronic conditions and at looking at lifestyle, diet and mental health as it affects a person's physical health.

for those with ige milk allergy it can be life threatening

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

With all due respect OP, you need to do your homework.

A lactose intolerance is intolerance to the sugars in the milk, the body can't process the sugars and it hurts.

Someone with an ige allergy to milk is totally and utterly different. They would have an immune response to the milk proteins.

For example, children who are hugely anaphylactic to milk, would be absolutely fine to have Ashton and Parsons teething powder. Because it contains lactose, not cows milk protein....

This is obviously a conversation of deaf people
On my part, I asked as a scientist.

How do you know that over-prescription of antibiotics caused your DD to catch every bug around?

Every trace of milk protein removed from the lactose from milk?

not a risk I would be happy to take with someone with high response to milk.

depends, has the lactose been heat treated to destroy any protein that may linger?

Still advice is to avoid from what I have heard. its a by product of milk so needs to be avoided by those with severe milk allergy.

www.allergyuk.org/milk-allergy/milk-allergy

www.anaphylaxis.org.uk/userfiles/files/Factsheets/Cow's%20Milk%20final%20v6%20Dec%202014.pdf

just some extra info on milk allergy. not particularly linked to thread conversation, but is useful info on this allergy.

What's the harm in alternative medicine?

What's the harm in applied kinesiology, which is probably close to what this guy's "doctor" was doing.

I'd be a lot warier of alternative medicine prescribed by someone who wasn't an actual doctor than of alternative treatments recommended by a doctor in addition to standard medical treatments. This goes extra for an alternative medicine practitioner or resource that tells patients to avoid conventional medicine. I'd be REALLY wary of going to an alternative medical practitioner for a condition that was at all likely to kill me. Like peanut allergies.