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There is a comment in this thread downvoted and killed, but I think it's not an entirely unreasonable question - and it's possible that someone here knows the a

• fzeroracer 8y ago
  I'm wondering if they tried chicken noodle soup. That's been my family's home remedy for sickness and considering we seem to get better after every cold, it has a 100% success rate. To be less sardonic, it's an unreasonable question because it has zero scientific basis. I've had naturopathic family members attempt to give things to children that were definitely not safe in any shape or form.
  • aaronbrethorst 8y ago
    How about the idea that you can make tea from the leaves and bark of a willow tree, and use it to treat fevers and aches and pains? Does that sound like a ridiculous folk remedy?
    • baobrain 8y ago
      (For those unfamiliar, aspirin was discovered this way)
    • fzeroracer 8y ago
      If you want to be remarkably disengenous and take my argument out of context, sure. But I will not stand for people recommending alternative medicine for absolutely everything. I already had to deal with a family member doing just that, forcing random concoctions of nonsense onto a family member suffering from cancer and attempting to divert them from actual treatment. Especially when they act like they're better than doctors and can't back up their recommendations with anything remotely resembling research.
      • ummonk 8y ago
        The context was that you were replying to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19686423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19686423 Within that context, you're the one being disingenuous by likening it to diverting people from actual treatment and trying random concoctions for cancer treatment.
      • aaronbrethorst 8y ago
        But I will not stand for people recommending alternative medicine for absolutely everything I totally agree. The anti-vaxxers, for instance, are incredibly dangerous not just to the health of individuals, but to modern civilization. My point is that just because something is a folk remedy, or predates the invention of the scientific method, doesn't mean it's inherently without value. Rigorous scientific studies can and should be done on these sorts of things—I don't think anyone should blindly accept a folk remedy, especially one contraindicated by proper research. But there is a certain dismissiveness amongst many folks like us of anything not invented by the pharmaceutical industry that may do us all a disservice.
        • Chris_Chambers 8y ago
          Even if vaccines were honestly what their peddlers claimed, they are harmful and dysgenic. The weak should perish so the survivors are more resilient. Vaccines subvert this critical natural process. Everyone who gets vaccinated should therefore also be sterilized as a basic precaution to prevent unpredictable damage to the human gene pool. This rule should be retroactively applied effective immediately, starting with anyone found to have a reddit account.
        • shawnz 8y ago
          > But there is a certain dismissiveness amongst many folks like us of anything not invented by the pharmaceutical industry I don't think that's true. The cures don't need to be invented by the pharmaceutical industry to be taken seriously. But they do need to be studied and commercialized by the pharmaceutical industry to be taken seriously. How could you take seriously a pharmaceutical product which is rejected by its own industry? Obviously it's not commercializable in an honest way if that's the case, or someone would have done it by now.
    • shawnz 8y ago
      At that time, before Aspirin was demonstrated to be an effective cure, I'd say it would have indeed been ridiculous to use it outside an experimental setting.
  • maratd 8y ago
    Yes, because trial and error over thousands of years of trying local flora couldn't possibly yield a solution from an eco-system that has to actively fight off fungal infections. /sarcasm
    • dmix 8y ago
      Yes everything that 'comes from the earth' is automatically better for you than something that was rigorously clinically tested!
      • ummonk 8y ago
        That's not the contention. The contention is that concoctions that have been developed by people who have experimented with home remedies for centuries should be clinically tested (e.g. by administering to someone with a drug-resistant fungal infection) to see whether they might be effective.
        • dmix 8y ago
          Who is holding scientists back from doing this exactly?
          • ummonk 8y ago
            Nobody currently, though fzeroracer seems to think it is unreasonable for scientists to do this.
          • ralph84 8y ago
            Pharmaceutical research tends to focus on patentable molecules, not unpatentable plants.
            • dmix 8y ago
              That's why I didn't mention the pharma companies. If it legitimately helps people there's still tons of money to be made off of it, such as marketing it properly and some optimized form for consumption - like how Epipen scammed the public with their 'form factor' patents which held up generic brands for years.
  • DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Garlic and coconut oil are both known to have antibiotic properties. I'm not familiar with blackseed. For context, aspirin and quinine both come from plants (trees in both cases, iirc). Capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot peppers, gets used as the active ingredient in over-the-counter topical arthritis medication. Due to the hot, humid climate, jungle cultures deal excessively much with fungal infections. IIRC, quinine was a traditional treatment for malaria well before Western medicine discovered it. My recollection is this id how Western medicine learned of it -- from locals who knew it as an effective remedy. Last I checked, malaria was becoming resistant to synthetic derivatives of quinine. Such strains were still treatable with actual quinine.
  • jMyles 8y ago
    I'm with you on the desire for scientific rigor. My point wasn't that the remedy mentioned in the comment per se has merit, but that the discussion is probably better without it being killed.
• clucas 8y ago
  Per the article, the fungus was in her bloodstream - I think mainlining fried coconut oil is probably contraindicated.
  • jawilson2 8y ago
    I can see you've never tried a keto diet.
    • jniedrauer 8y ago
      MCT oil is an acquired taste.
• bdamm 8y ago
  My family uses water bombers to put out all of our cathedral fires. Ok, back from sarcasm land. I have faith that the anti-fungal researchers have an expansive view of anti-fungal treatments, and the likelihood that a random person on ycombinator knows about a treatment that these professionals don't, is about zero.
• voldacar 8y ago
  Your comment reminds me of that weird medieval remedy that turned out to be able to kill MRSA (!) [0] There's certainly plenty of BS in the traditional medicine world, but there may be a lot of remedies lurking right under science's nose. [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nasty-medieval-remedy-kills-mrsa-180954808/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nasty-medieval-rem...
  • xenadu02 8y ago
    That's a case of "broken clock right twice a day". Out of the tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of medieval so-called remedies it turns out _one_ is accidentally useful. It would be more surprising if absolutely none of the remedies were useful. You'd expect at least one or two hits just from chance.