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

[YourAmplePlumPoster]

I have a friend I've known all my life. He first of all refused to have the Covid vaccine and then refused treatment for his prostate cancer and said he was going to treat it with homeopathic medicine. Result was that it spread to his hip bone. Luckily he started chemo and it's worked. What is wrong with these people?

Where on earth do you get that from?

Massage was used by Romans and Greeks.

When we’re learning more and more about UPF, microplastics, the effects of chemical fertilisers/crop sprays it seems a little pedantic to pick up on people worrying about chemicals in food - we should all be concerned about artificial chemicals that have made it into our food chain, we still don’t really know what they’re doing to us.

Same - on the bbc news site. Her mum was that ‘nurse’ all over social media during lockdown.

But does he realise now it’s spread it’s not curable?

I would rather call it modern medicine than western medicine as many quack theories - homeopathy for one- are also western in origin. Post pandemic, I am not surprised that many have fallen into a conspiracist mindset - it is a coping mechanism and we have just undergone a collective trauma with historic global shutdowns. There was a lot of fear, panic, misinformation etc to deal with. I'd cut people some slack. There were also a lot of educated people who fell into a fair bit of scientism and went along with questionable breaches of civil liberty.

Firstly, that won’t happen unless there’s money in it like there is big pharma. Secondly, the point is, where does the policing stop? First it’s thoughts about medicine, then what. Branded a conspiracy theorist for thinking anything that’s against the grain or mass media. Shunned, outcast, ridiculed for thinking something that isn’t the ‘norm’. We’ve been here before.

From history, duh. Massage practice originated from China and India. Any decent history book will tell you that.

I’m fairly blunt if anyone asks my opinion. I think that NICE is probably one of the greatest developments we have in this country from the last 25 years and the scientific method is a wonderful thing. I’m involved in a very minor healthcare research project and what it takes now to run a proper research project (several levels above what I’m doing) is inspiring. When people write stuff like ‘For mental health though alternative treatments and therapies seem to be far more effective than anything the NHS can offer’ I just want to hit something because ‘mental health’ is not a definable condition and ‘alternative treatments and therapies’ could include practically anything and what you end up with is someone with an active psychotic condition believing these vague statements apply to them, refusing their medication which is challenging to take, and killing themselves with a huge impact on everyone around them, like my late Dh. So fuck that. I’m open to better research on psychosis and will be delighted if something ‘natural’ turns out to be more effective than the cocktail my Dh was on until he stopped them, but eg mindfulness gave him a relapse and research has shown it makes symptoms worse in a lot of severe conditions.

Yes I found that a few sessions of osteopathy at the right time did more for my inflamed neck than physiotherapy, but tbh the stats probably show that it was more the timing than the technique involved.

Certainly I think people like the ‘Natural Nurse’ kill a lot of human beings, not just her daughter. I’d prefer her not to be in jail with a lot of vulnerable women but I’d like her toxic nonsense shut down somehow.

There was a woman at my workplace has been heavily peddling vitamin supplements, clearly a pyramid scheme. Dodgy af.

Sorry didn't mean to quote you there

Anti-vaxxers are a threat to society.

Everything starts somewhere, but you said that massage was not part of western tradition when plainly it is.

He definitely isn't a doctor, he runs an alternative health practice. I've been so busy with caring for my relative to do much about him but I'm going to look into it.

I said it “wasn’t a western tradition” which originally it wasn’t, as it originated from the east. Just because we use it in the west now doesn’t mean we can claim we started the practice.

Unfortunately there’s not much you can do about it. If he’s advertising unproven treatments and claiming they cure cancer that is illegal under the cancer act. There’s nothing actually stopping people from setting up a practice and telling people not to use conventional cancer treatments and use unproven treatments instead.

There is a place for 'Complementary Medicine' - 'treatments' and practitioners who do no harm, can help ease pain with massage, essential oils and specially trained to flag up issues to 'regular' medical practitioners

When these practitioners go above and beyond their scope and training, taking gullible and vulnerable patients with them, that's when they deserve punishment

The problem is the Internet

Instead of creating access to reams of high quality, science backed, scientific and medical research, every idiot in every village fell for scam artists

YANBU - while recognising there are many things wrong with mainstream medicine like misogyny, racism etc that stops people from receiving fair treatment, yeah, people who push others, often vulnerable ones, to turn down effective, safe, proven treatments are scumbags in my book.

The immunocompromised rely on other folks being vaccinated. It's called herd immunity and helps keep them safe, and in some instances, alive.

There is a lot of misconception and misinformation about the purpose of vaccines, how they work, and what they do.

They are a wonderful thing. Especially when those of us who can get vaccinated do so.

Complementary medicine can be both ineffective and dangerous. It can have no effect on the illness it purports to treat while at the same time it can contain harmful substances (some Chinese “medicines” contain unregulated steroids, for example), or be a harmful substance itself (such as Kava kava), or can cause interactions with conventional medicines (St John’s wort).

And it’s not true that natural substances can’t be patented. If the active can be extracted and synthesised into a medicine of course it can be patented. Paclitaxel, made from yew bark extracts originally, was patented as Taxol.

You do realise that your choices are harming other people. For hurd immunity to work (you know that thing that's protecting you and your dc) we need over 92% of the population to be vaccinated. We were measles free for decades because of vacations, now we've lost our measles free status and there's been multiple outbreaks.
Because of the choices that you and other anti vaxers people will die and your dc are now at risk of serious disability and death.
I have a question for you, have you ever seen what happens when measles or German measles (rubella) runs rampant through an unvaccinated population (I have btw) if so how can you justify the risk you are taking for your dc and all those who can't be vaccinated or gain an immunity to these diseases?

Well, when enough people opt out of vaccines it does affect others.

Using natural medicine or homeopathic medicine (which isn't a natural medicine and is more like a belief in magic) doesn't directly affect wider society, and I don't think anyone feels threatened by it - I think most would view you more as a victim of the folks that peddle medical misinformation.

While I'm sure that sounds extremely condescending, as a smoker I have made an atrocious health-related decision (peddled via big tobacco) that is very likely to produce health outcomes worse than the ones that flow from yours, so I'm not going to attempt to mount a high horse any time soon.

Because if everyone was like you, measles would be endemic again and children would be harmed and die. It’s already happening in the USA.

Massage isn't herbal. It's the human touch that humans are primed to respond to from infancy, the psychological comfort of not actually being stuck with yet more needles - which is completely different from somebody like my FIL who decided that bananas would fix the effects of three strokes where he'd not sought help for the first two and had no choice about the third because the apartment security broke the door down. He was 63 and still believed that taking statins wouldn't have prevented any of the three of them, despite having been told years before that he had familial Hypercholesterolemia.

He didn't tell DP about the high cholesterol diagnosis either. So DP was somewhat surprised (and pissed off) to find out only once he became eligible for testing that oh, the doctors said that about him but it's all nonsense and bananas are really good for it. Although with the permanent speech problems as a result of the untreated strokes, maybe he meant to say actual medication and not fucking bananas.

Mind you, DP was entirely unvaccinated and FIL also attributes a 'terrible illness where granddad couldn't get out of bed for months' to the presence of an elephant ornament in the house instead of the autoimmune disease that DP has inherited from him - reckoned that every time DP had a flare, it meant that there was an image of an elephant in the house.

Bananas and fucking elephants. Instead of actual medicine.

Because you and your offspring are a very real threat to unborn children, pregnant women, newborn babies, children and adults undergoing cancer treatment or are immunocompromised and anybody who has come to the country from somewhere that doesn't provide protection against absolutely hideous diseases for free like we are incredibly lucky to have here.