5 ms·

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine. —Tim Minchin

by tkcranny 1y ago

jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
Dara O'Brien.
- atombender 1y ago
  Are you trying saying the quote is misattributed? Because it's from Tim Minchin's comedy act/poem "Storm" [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/KtYkyB35zkk?si=QfGJepREYJIlg3hd https://youtu.be/KtYkyB35zkk?si=QfGJepREYJIlg3hd
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    I'm not sure if it was completely original there. It's a relatively common retort now, though I do think that Storm was the first time I recall hearing it.
  - jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
    interesting, Dara o Brien makes the same joke. Can't be bothered to check which came first. 2min58 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZN-hBTBUE&pp=ygUcbyBCcmlhbiBhbHRlcm5hdGl2ZSBtZWRpY2luZQ%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZN-hBTBUE&pp=ygUcbyBCcmlhbiB... I think comedy trends have fashions. At the time comedians made jokes about religion, now they make jokes about trans people, or about being "canceled". When you narrow the range of jokes you might increase the joke collision rate.
zaptheimpaler 1y ago
However, the case of meditation/mindfulness shows that it can take a very long time between a treatment being invented and it being proven to work. It was called pseudoscience until it was statistically proven to work. Unproven is not disproven. But it takes discernment to know which unproven thing might work and won't hurt though. TCM sounds more dangerous than not because the herbs you can get will be unregulated and possibly contaminated.
- arp242 1y ago
  Something can simultaneously be a pseudo-science and still work. Do some aspects of TCM have benefits? Sure, probably – it's a huge field. But that's more coincidental than anything else, and their mechanisms of action are unrelated to TCM's pseudo-scientific theories. If you go to a forest and start eating random stuff then some will also have some benefit. I'm not familiar with the history of meditation or mindfulness, but I've seen people claim some pretty ridiculous things about yoga, perhaps the most ludicrous was someone claiming that some positions will prevent certain cancers due to "massaging your organs". Yoga absolutely has benefits but that's just nonsense.
rtpg 1y ago
I'm not particularly bought into the traditional chinese medicine stuff but isn't the line more drawn at how "normal" medicine is about synthesizing specific doses of chemicals to give those? Meanwhile if someone told me "yeah eating a bunch of ginger when you have a cold is good to you because ginger has a bunch of stuff that's good for your body then" I don't have a particularly hard time believing it. Sure! Why not! The article's critique about symptom management rather than disease management is legit though. And the precision for actual research is good. But at the end of the day if my body needs some stuff for symptom management and some TCM strategy involves me giving myself like 20x the dose of it... well it's something, isn't it? Though you could argue about it "deserving" credit or not. Nobody whines about the unscientificness of giving yourself a bunch of salt through chicken noodle soup after a hangover.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  No... Normal medicine is whatever we know works. It is unfathomably hard to figure out whether something works, ergo it is very specific knowledge (specific isolated compounds in specific amounts). > well it's something, isn't it? It's probably not! If you want to say such remedies produce a placebo effect and that's sufficient for such purposes, IMO that's a valid approach.
  - rtpg 1y ago
    Fair enough, I can agree with the idea that you draw the line at "knowledge, gotten in the 'correct' way" as the categorization strategy. In the abstract I'm open to some specific traditional medicine thing working for "some" reason, but I understand that that makes me (as they say in the industry) a mark.
    - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
      No no, my point is that it's unbelievably hard to know things. The reason we do unfathomably expensive clinical trials is because that's what's required to isolate signal from noise in a biological system. The reason they fail so frequently is because we're wrong most of the time we try it. It is absolutely possible to stumble upon things, as is often the origin of hypotheses that develop into drugs, but 99.999% of these will still end up being false. It's way more likely you found a thing that convinces you it does something desirable in the body than that you actually found something that does something desirable in the body.
A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
TCM has a lot of wins along just those lines. For instance: Artemisinin (qinghaosu) from artemisia annua. This won the 2015 Nobel Prize, and is now the cornerstone of global malaria therapy. Arsenic trioxide, the purified form of the TCM mineral pishuang, now a very common treatment for acute promyelocytic leukemia. Often curative in a single dose: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213048917300080 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221304891... Camptothecin from camptotheca acuminata, precursor of topotecan and irinotecan for solid tumours. Ephedrine from ephedra sinica -- template for modern bronchodilators and decongestants. Many others. Omacetaxine, minnelide, and more. Very often, the first thing a medicinal chemist seeking new drug templates does is look to herbs that are used by indigenous populations or in "traditional" medicine systems. There's an entire journal dedicated to this: > https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-ethnopharmacology https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-ethnopharma...
- roncesvalles 1y ago
  It's still not a vindication of TCM specifically. All traditional medicine cultures have contributed something to modern medicine. E.g. willow bark was used to treat pain for thousands of years, which led to the discovery of aspirin. I believe even cholesterol-reducing statins come from traditional medicinal herb. Naturopathic medicinal cultures aren't totally bullshit. They're just "unscientific" i.e. they haven't gone through the rigors of the scientific method to establish their efficacy, or often their etiologies and mechanisms of action are completely made-up.
  - A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
    > I believe even cholesterol-reducing statins come from traditional medicinal herb. Yeah, lovastatin comes from red yeast rice, which is also TCM. The other statins are downstream of it. > Naturopathic medicinal cultures aren't totally bullshit. They're just "unscientific" i.e. they haven't gone through the rigors of the scientific method to establish their efficacy, or often their etiologies and mechanisms of action are completely made-up. I agree 100%. But natural products are -- and always have been -- the great repository of drug templates. All modern pharmacopoeias owe a real debt to TCM in particular. Instead of complaining like the guy who wrote the article in OP, it's best to try and take what's good and discard what's bad, without preconceptions or prejudice.
SuperNinKenDo 1y ago
On the other hand, this does lead to a situation where people simultaneously scoff at a school of thought while telling you that all the useful stuff from said school has already been integrated into whatever orthodoxy they represent. Must be nice to be able to claim credit for something while deriding the people who actually discovered it. Not that I'm a huge "stan" for TCM or anything. I'm very much not.

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine. —Tim Minchin

jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago

Dara O'Brien.

atombender 1y ago
Are you trying saying the quote is misattributed? Because it's from Tim Minchin's comedy act/poem "Storm" [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/KtYkyB35zkk?si=QfGJepREYJIlg3hd https://youtu.be/KtYkyB35zkk?si=QfGJepREYJIlg3hd
- rcxdude 1y ago
  I'm not sure if it was completely original there. It's a relatively common retort now, though I do think that Storm was the first time I recall hearing it.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
  interesting, Dara o Brien makes the same joke. Can't be bothered to check which came first. 2min58 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZN-hBTBUE&pp=ygUcbyBCcmlhbiBhbHRlcm5hdGl2ZSBtZWRpY2luZQ%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZN-hBTBUE&pp=ygUcbyBCcmlhbiB... I think comedy trends have fashions. At the time comedians made jokes about religion, now they make jokes about trans people, or about being "canceled". When you narrow the range of jokes you might increase the joke collision rate.

zaptheimpaler 1y ago

However, the case of meditation/mindfulness shows that it can take a very long time between a treatment being invented and it being proven to work. It was called pseudoscience until it was statistically proven to work. Unproven is not disproven. But it takes discernment to know which unproven thing might work and won't hurt though. TCM sounds more dangerous than not because the herbs you can get will be unregulated and possibly contaminated.

arp242 1y ago
Something can simultaneously be a pseudo-science and still work. Do some aspects of TCM have benefits? Sure, probably – it's a huge field. But that's more coincidental than anything else, and their mechanisms of action are unrelated to TCM's pseudo-scientific theories. If you go to a forest and start eating random stuff then some will also have some benefit. I'm not familiar with the history of meditation or mindfulness, but I've seen people claim some pretty ridiculous things about yoga, perhaps the most ludicrous was someone claiming that some positions will prevent certain cancers due to "massaging your organs". Yoga absolutely has benefits but that's just nonsense.

rtpg 1y ago

I'm not particularly bought into the traditional chinese medicine stuff but isn't the line more drawn at how "normal" medicine is about synthesizing specific doses of chemicals to give those? Meanwhile if someone told me "yeah eating a bunch of ginger when you have a cold is good to you because ginger has a bunch of stuff that's good for your body then" I don't have a particularly hard time believing it. Sure! Why not! The article's critique about symptom management rather than disease management is legit though. And the precision for actual research is good. But at the end of the day if my body needs some stuff for symptom management and some TCM strategy involves me giving myself like 20x the dose of it... well it's something, isn't it? Though you could argue about it "deserving" credit or not. Nobody whines about the unscientificness of giving yourself a bunch of salt through chicken noodle soup after a hangover.

sorcerer-mar 1y ago
No... Normal medicine is whatever we know works. It is unfathomably hard to figure out whether something works, ergo it is very specific knowledge (specific isolated compounds in specific amounts). > well it's something, isn't it? It's probably not! If you want to say such remedies produce a placebo effect and that's sufficient for such purposes, IMO that's a valid approach.
- rtpg 1y ago
  Fair enough, I can agree with the idea that you draw the line at "knowledge, gotten in the 'correct' way" as the categorization strategy. In the abstract I'm open to some specific traditional medicine thing working for "some" reason, but I understand that that makes me (as they say in the industry) a mark.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    No no, my point is that it's unbelievably hard to know things. The reason we do unfathomably expensive clinical trials is because that's what's required to isolate signal from noise in a biological system. The reason they fail so frequently is because we're wrong most of the time we try it. It is absolutely possible to stumble upon things, as is often the origin of hypotheses that develop into drugs, but 99.999% of these will still end up being false. It's way more likely you found a thing that convinces you it does something desirable in the body than that you actually found something that does something desirable in the body.

A_D_E_P_T 1y ago

TCM has a lot of wins along just those lines. For instance: Artemisinin (qinghaosu) from artemisia annua. This won the 2015 Nobel Prize, and is now the cornerstone of global malaria therapy. Arsenic trioxide, the purified form of the TCM mineral pishuang, now a very common treatment for acute promyelocytic leukemia. Often curative in a single dose: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213048917300080 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221304891... Camptothecin from camptotheca acuminata, precursor of topotecan and irinotecan for solid tumours. Ephedrine from ephedra sinica -- template for modern bronchodilators and decongestants. Many others. Omacetaxine, minnelide, and more. Very often, the first thing a medicinal chemist seeking new drug templates does is look to herbs that are used by indigenous populations or in "traditional" medicine systems. There's an entire journal dedicated to this: > https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-ethnopharmacology https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-ethnopharma...

roncesvalles 1y ago
It's still not a vindication of TCM specifically. All traditional medicine cultures have contributed something to modern medicine. E.g. willow bark was used to treat pain for thousands of years, which led to the discovery of aspirin. I believe even cholesterol-reducing statins come from traditional medicinal herb. Naturopathic medicinal cultures aren't totally bullshit. They're just "unscientific" i.e. they haven't gone through the rigors of the scientific method to establish their efficacy, or often their etiologies and mechanisms of action are completely made-up.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
  > I believe even cholesterol-reducing statins come from traditional medicinal herb. Yeah, lovastatin comes from red yeast rice, which is also TCM. The other statins are downstream of it. > Naturopathic medicinal cultures aren't totally bullshit. They're just "unscientific" i.e. they haven't gone through the rigors of the scientific method to establish their efficacy, or often their etiologies and mechanisms of action are completely made-up. I agree 100%. But natural products are -- and always have been -- the great repository of drug templates. All modern pharmacopoeias owe a real debt to TCM in particular. Instead of complaining like the guy who wrote the article in OP, it's best to try and take what's good and discard what's bad, without preconceptions or prejudice.

SuperNinKenDo 1y ago

On the other hand, this does lead to a situation where people simultaneously scoff at a school of thought while telling you that all the useful stuff from said school has already been integrated into whatever orthodoxy they represent. Must be nice to be able to claim credit for something while deriding the people who actually discovered it. Not that I'm a huge "stan" for TCM or anything. I'm very much not.