I want a new non-drug
“These statements,” says the label, “have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”
This particular boilerplate, or variations thereof, appears on all those nutritional supplements they sell in the mall or at the health-food store; if the stuff did make claims, it would be considered a drug and would therefore be subject to tighter FDA scrutiny. And the FDA, cruel and heartless bastards that they are, will expect things like clinical trials and actual evidence of efficacy.
We ourselves are not always so skeptical, it seems:
I love my husband, but he’s so susceptible to believing “medical” advice… EXCEPT what his doctors tell him.
If I stop eating tomatoes and potatoes, my arthritis won’t go away. If my husband starts taking alpha lipoic acid, his type II diabetes won’t be cured. Homeopathic remedies and the people who sell them are worthless.
If it were just my husband, I wouldn’t worry much. But it’s not. It’s seemingly everywhere I turn recently. And so much of the misinformation calls itself science, that one really has to be careful not to be misled.
This calls for a disclosure.
I mentioned last summer that creeping neuropathy was leaving me a tad numb at the toes; I noted at the time that there was no cure.
What I didn’t mention was that I’d been reading all that same quasi-medical stuff, and I decided to try out, just for the hell of it, a bottle of what looks like ground-up shagbark and stray bits of linoleum compressed into green ellipses, the particular combination of which — including, not incidentally, the infamous alpha lipoic acid — is suggested (never “claimed,” of course) to have a salutary effect on such nerve damage.
Lipoic acid has been shown in cell culture experiments to increase cellular uptake of glucose by recruiting the glucose transporter GLUT4 to the cell membrane, suggesting its use in diabetes, although these findings are controversial as lipoic acid worsened the condition of type 1 diabetes induced rats.
Of course, type 1 and type 2 are different as night and, um, well, twilight.
After about 180 of these tabs, I don’t think things have really gotten any better. But they also haven’t gotten any worse, which must be considered a boon for someone with a degenerative disease. Inevitably, this suggests a question: how much of this is due to the actual efficacy of the compound, and how much to the placebo effect? That, I can’t tell you. But if the next question is “Would you pay thirty cents a tab for a really good placebo?” the answer, I suspect, is Yes.
I suppose the next step is the homeopathic route: dissolve one tablet in forty-eight gallons of water, and then take a couple of sips every day.
sya »
7 February 2010 · 10:14 am
Sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. I am reminded of a case study I heard about–a HIV patient was taking some traditional medicine thinking that it would cure him but ended up contracting some sort of weird bacterial disease. It turned out that this “medicine” contained snake parts originating from an animal population in Mexico that was known to carry the disease.
Donna B. »
7 February 2010 · 10:15 am
Oh dear, I’m afraid that you misunderstand the exact and proper method of manufacturing a homeopathic remedy. It requires exact mathematics to make sure you dilute the substance enough so that there is not a single molecule left, but not so much that you erase the water’s memory of the molecule.
Succussion, (shaking the water) is then required to activate the potential of… something.
I strongly urge you NOT to try this at home. You must, to be safe, consult a homeopathic physician (the more he charges, the better his qualifications) and get the exact medication you need.
This is scientific stuff, ya know!!!!111!!