Britain's new cultural divide is not between Christian and Muslim, Hindu and Jew. It is between those who have faith and those who do not.

[bossykate]

fascinating article in today's guardian.

here

total crap. 8 of the 10 top used drugs in the west are derived from plant sources. There is a whole area of sceince devoted to looking at herbal remidies and testing their efficay. It is called ethnobotany!

However 'criminal' you might think them, without them my dh would be dead by now.

Crystal gazing or casting fortunes would have left him dying in agony.

Just like they did in the 'Times of the Ancients'

No, I don't think it is criminal to research and develop medicines that save people's lives. I don't understand.

Was it Snake Oil where JD said if alternative medicine worked just as well as conventional medicine, it wouldn't be alternative anymore?

and of course the fact that the 'herbal remedy' people also sell the stuff, and in doing so generate millions of pounds of profits is OK I suppose, because they are 'holistic'.

But they still want a slice of the NHS pie MB

criminal?

Criminal?

Of all available anti-cancer drugs developed from 1940 to 2002, 40% were natural products or natural-product-derived with another 8% considered natural-product mimics. Plant anti-cancer agents currently in clinical use can be categorised into four main classes of compounds: vinca (or Catharanthus) alkaloids, epipodophyllotoxins, taxanes, and camptothecins. Taxanes and camptothecins alone accounted for approximately one-third of the global anti-cancer market in 2002, with a market value of over US$2.75 billion.

Aspirin or acetylsalicylic acid, a historically important plant drug, was extracted from the bark of the willow tree (Salix alba), and went on to become one of the most widely available and used compounds for mild pain management, in use since its market debut in the year of 1899.

Current cost of getting a new drug to market is somewhere between £100 million to £1000 million, because of the stringent tests that have to be done before you can legally use it.

Or you can just forget all that and brew up herbs of unknown provinance, concentration, and impurities and complain when regulatory authorities expect you to do some work to a. show that it works and thet b, it is 'safe' before you sell them.

Phramaceutical companies are far from 'pure' but thank christ for them. Because of them, I no longer have to watch my beuatiful dh writing in agony on the floor vomiting bile every 10 minutes. At present his drugs bill.....without the cytotoxics is costing £1000 a month.

Oh and dh's cytotoxics are a chemical analogue of a naturally occuring DNA nucleotide.

Look, I've nothing against people necking herbal remedies, cycling to evensong at dusk, reading Mystic Meg or even peering at chicken entrails, if they like doing it and it makes them happy. I just think they are all equally, well, let's say, unlikely. And no basis for an education or government policy.

Oh god MB {{}}

I obviously cross posted MB. So sorry. Glad the drugs are still working though.

Well that's the point exactly Aloha. Everyone is 'free' to believe what they want as long as they don't start dragging the rest of us into the bloody yurt

And actually, herbal remedies are not as unlikely. I suppose I mean the likes of kineisiology and Reiki.

They generaly work for 3-6 months. then the cancer cells become immune and the cancer will come back.

But it has bought us some valuable, and liveable, time.

It is so, so unfair.

For a while I was PA to a woman with MS. She used to be psychically healed by a woman over the phone that told her she could cure HIV and AIDs.

and at the point at which the horrible life experience that you are currently living mb is used by you to shut me up, i withdraw, respectfully from the argument. because it is no longer a debate.

I'm so sorry your dh is ill. You know that. I really hope that the comforting news you got today that I saw on the other thread is a marker for what is to come, more and more good news. sincerely.

They are vampires who prey on the sick IMO.

Suppose you've got a 'wise woman' treating people with herbs. How does she decide which herbs to use? If she (or the generations before her who've passed on their knowledge to her) tried different ones, noticed what worked, and passed on that knowledge, then however different from modern medicine it may be, that's still science at work. Experiment, observation, refinement of a theory (e.g. the theory that this willow bark may help headaches, or whatever).

So that wise woman in her cottage, becoming skilled in knowledge of the herbs and rare plants that can heal by decades of experience treating people with them - she's a scientist too. She's also a scientist if she notices that looking at the whole person, listening to them, looking at more than just the ill bit, leads to them getting more better, more quickly.

Anyone looking at something and observing what works and what doesn't work, and acting on that basis, is a scientist. Not everyone who does that may be a good scientist - some may not realise when what they're observing is an experimental artefact, or understand what counts as statistical significance, or all sorts of things. But anyone just basically trying to base their behaviour on observations of what works and what doesn't work, and repeated trying out of new things to see what works best, is essentially just as much a scientist as the classic 'man in a white coat at a lab bench'.

I'm not using my horrible life experience to shut you up.

Rather I used it to make the point that in the times of the ancients my dh would have died around 2 months ago, writhing in agony. This is not supposition, but fact. herbs, and chanting, and re-aligning chachras would have done bugger all for him. In fact, because of his system, even opiates, which were know about, make him vomit bile. He is alive, and in good form because of cold, hard science.

Life expectancy at the turn of the 1900s for a woman was 50. Now it is over 70. they had herbs then

trouble with the herbs tho, is that you cannot acuuratly decide on a dose, since the amount of active ingredient will vary from season to season, because of the growing conditions.

And since it is the active ingredient that matter, rather than the herb per se, isn't it better to get it in a know amount, of a known strenth, with no unwanted additives?

And a mitwiff would have been bugger all use to me and to ds as we died in a torrent of blood because of my placenta praevia. I, my son and my daughter all owe our lives to the surgeons who performed the surgery, the scientists who developed the scanning machines, the anaesthetic, the antibiotics and all the other elements that made me come through my pregnancy alive and with a healthy baby. Without science I would be dead. Which obviously would not be a great loss to the world (not being sarcastic, I am very realistic about my lack of importance) but my dh would have been very sad, and I like being alive.

Ok mb. i'd counter that he might not be ill in the first place. god knows we're exposed to more carcinogens then we were pre industrial revolution, the particularly insidious kind of stress that modern industrial living involves is a contributor and thus the incidence of cancer is far greater...

Progress?

I quite like being alive too!

A rather nasty infection of the mastoid bone would have done for me as a child without antibiotics.

Thanks to the pharma industy dh and I have had 12 years together. If they hadn't of treated his testicular cancer 12 years ago with so nasty but excellent cytotoxics, he'd have died then and I would have never had the kids.

Which as you say, would be sad for me.