15 ms·

Don’t Take Medical Advice From the New York Times Magazine

114 points by tokenadult 14y ago

Zakharov 14y ago
Startup idea: take out-of-patent medicines, rebrand them as herbal remedies, triple the markup, get a reputation as selling "safe" herbal remedies that work particularly well.
addlepate 14y ago
Saying that everything is comprised of chemicals reminds me of the complaint that the phrase "could care less" is the logical opposite of the way people use it. True in a narrow sense, sure, but willfully ignorant of what people are actually trying to convey. This kind of thinking drives me batty, and people who fancy themselves scientists seem to enjoy indulging in it. "Technically right" isn't the best kid of right, it's the worst. (If you're interested in the "care less" thing, check out "The Language Mavens" chapter from The Language Instinct by Pinker.)
electic 14y ago
How about, "Don't take any medical advice from any magazine?" Now why is that? Well because it is a run of the mill magazine. I am not sure why people read and follow this stuff.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  The slate article isn't providing any medical advice, it's merely telling people that they shouldn't fear synthetically manufactured medicines while being completely trusting of naturopathic ones. If anything it's telling people to be more informed, skeptical, and to use reason rather than emotion when making informed choices about medicine.
  - electic 14y ago
    Yes, I got that. However, it is still medical advice...coming from a magazine. What to "fear", "use", or any other word you can swap in there is still the same thing....advice.
hecuba12 14y ago
Don't take any advice from Slate.
capkutay 14y ago
If I believed journalistic health advice I'd think Ice cream is good for me because it speeds up my metabolism but exercising is bad because it makes me eat too much.
Alex3917 14y ago
"Another common chemical name for methotrexate is amethopterin, which comes from the roots meth, Greek for wine, which I might stretch to spirits, and pterin, Greek for feathers." Except for it's ameth, which would mean lack of intoxication, a la 'amethyst'. In fact the whole article is complete BS as it doesn't even remotely align with the views the author presents in the original article -- nowhere does the author say that she is 'chemophobic', nor is this even hinted at beyond her saying that her husband has always been "more comfortable with pharmaceuticals, more trusting in general." And of course naturopathic medicine is going to seem like pure evil if you're willfully blinding yourself to the arguments in its favor and only seeing the (legitimate) weaknesses, as will anything else for that matter.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Except the NYT magazine article author makes it quite clear that she is chemophobic, with repeated statements about her fear. Here's a direct quote: "It reinforced an image of Shepherd as sick, forever dependent on a drug I felt afraid of, however unreasonable a doctor might tell me that fear was." Similarly, when a doctor suggests increasing the dose of methotrexate she panics.
  - Alex3917 14y ago
    I guess I still don't see anything there that could be construed as 'chemophobia'. She doesn't want her kid to self-identify as sick or to die of liver failure. I don't see how either of these concerns are crazy or anti-technology or whatever. Especially since in the beginning she says she was excited about the diagnosis because it meant they could try different drugs.
- carbocation 14y ago
  Is there objective evidence that any element of naturopathic medicine has consistent, reproducible, positive value?
  - Alex3917 14y ago
    By element do you mean a specific plant or the broader principles of naturopathy?
ars 14y ago
addlepate: Your account has been banned, and almost no one can see your posts. To reply to you: I challenge you to define "chemical" in the way you are attempting to redefine it. People want to use it to describe unsafe or non-natural compounds, but a little bit of thinking will quickly show that that definition is impossible. Use chemical as an adjective instead of a noun and you will do much better. Used as a noun chemical has no meaning: Everything is a chemical, so saying the word says nothing at all.
- addlepate 14y ago
  I know that, but thank you. Let us agree to disagree.
- robotresearcher 14y ago
  Some non-chemical things: Justice, beauty, truth, prime numbers, O(log n) insertion time of a binary tree, Beethoven's 5th. Just for the record.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - ars 14y ago
    Those aren't things, they are concepts.
    - robotresearcher 14y ago
      And a concept isn't a thing? This is an old philosophical debate that pretty much melts away in practice. For all practical purposes things like songs and ideas are things. See how you weren't confused when I referred to them as things in the previous sentence?
tokenadult 14y ago
From the article: "We are a chemophobic culture. Chemical has become a synonym for something artificial, adulterated, hazardous, or toxic. Chemicals are bad—for you, for your children, for the environment. But whatever chemophobics would like to think, there is no avoiding chemicals, no way to create chemical-free zones. Absolutely everything is made of atoms and molecules; it’s all chemistry." This was striking to me, as I had seen an example just recently elsewhere in cyberspace of reasoning that "chemicals" are bad ingredients to have in a food, even though all foods are materials made up of, um, chemicals. I have seen similar comments earlier here on Hacker News. Matter is made up of atoms, and those atoms form various chemical elements or compounds or mixtures. We breath chemicals, we eat chemicals, we touch chemicals every day. Just because some foodstuffs have listed ingredients, with names that are sometimes difficult to read out loud (I have no trouble with the names, but then again I grew up with a parent who majored in chemistry) doesn't mean that those foods are dangerous. Whatever kind of food you think is perfectly safe surely contains some compounds with chemical names that are hard to spell or pronounce, but are nevertheless perfectly "natural," and usually not listed on an ingredients label. Don't worry about it.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  My favourite example was a "natural" shampoo bottle I saw: "100% Chemical Free!" My joke about selling bottles of hard vacuum didn't seem to hurt their sales.
  - drakeandrews 14y ago
    There was a company in the UK that did that, and got pounced on by Trading Standards. They now say something equally stupid, but less offensive to the powers that be.
- bane 14y ago
  Please don't even get me started on "natural" or "processed foods".
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
passionfruit 14y ago
This article makes some bad analogies. Showing the structure of two different molecules and acting aghast that someone would choose one over the other is like saying all digital information is 1's and 0's so it's all the same. Or it's like saying all words are just a bunch of the same letters therefore they have no meaning.
- wvenable 14y ago
  Choosing one over the other because of how they are named is ridiculous -- not because of their composition.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  The point being that people react to the name and the classification ("natural" vs "chemical"), and they should be reacting to the scientifically verified effects and side-effects.
OGinparadise 14y ago
Don’t Take Medical Advice From the New York Times Magazine Don’t Take Medical Advice From the Slate Magazine either. Research all you want but call a doctor in the end.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  > call a doctor in the end Which is the point of this article.
leoh 14y ago
"We are a chemophobic culture." I take great issue with this statement. We are most decidedly not a chemophobic culture. People are more than willing to take medicines that are artificially synthesized and, as the author mentions, with good reason. I, for one, am not chemophobic. I personally know an individual who developed one of the first total-syntheses (i.e. "artificial" chemical synthesis) of a very important anti-cancer agent, Taxol. The TS of Taxol was exceedingly important, since a single dose required the sacrifice of an mature Yew tree -- something that would have been entirely unfeasible for the millions of people that stood to benefit from the drug. But there are miraculous, mysterious things that we do not understand about natural products and the human body. Take Yerba Maté, for example, a popular beverage in Argentina and coffee. Or wine and whiskey. What all these beverages have in common is that they rely on a principal chemical agent for their effect (methylxanthine or caffeine in the case of Yerba Maté and Coffee; ethanol in the case of wine or your favorite alcohol). Yet as the more sensitive among us have realized, each different concoction effects us differently -- even though the principal ingredient is the same (people report calming, yet stimulating effects from Yerba Maté as opposed to caffeine, etc.)! It turns out there is a very simple explanation for this. There are other constellations of chemicals in these concoctions which, in concert create an altogether particular and unique effect. This, I believe, is where "chemophobia" lies for some individuals (though again, I argue it is not widespread among the greater population). It lies in the fact that we are applying something very strong in a way that is not balanced or integrated. One very real mainstream example of this is how calcium is accompanied by vitamin D, as the latter enhances absorption of the the former. Since vitamin D helps strengthen the effect of calcium, patients can take safer doses of calcium which have great physiological effect. Another example is the fact that African American heart patients who take ACE inhibitors (drugs that lower blood pressure) along with diuretics have much, much better clinical outcomes than taking ACE inhibitors alone, which is the standard of treatment for most individuals. The hope, then, is that when taking something more "natural" as opposed to man-made is that that natural product will inherently contain a wider variety of compounds that taken together create a more potent, but gentle effect on the patient. Now of course, these effects could be created by taking combinations of man-made products. But first these combinations need to be discovered, and we are certainly a long ways off from that. And it is not easy--different people are affected by different combinations and deciphering the key players out of a set of natural products is not easy. This will take many more years of careful, non-biased research. And there is indeed incredible bias against natural products among mainstream medical establishment, which is rather absurd given that so many of the drugs we take today come from natural sources! To me this is the real travesty, not "chemophobia." Moreover, we need to embrace treatments that work, even if we can't explain them (provided that they are safe--more on this and LD50's in a moment). Good scientists work with existing knowledge. Great scientists love the perplexing, paradoxical, seemingly impossible phenomena that are not well characterized, which the FDA (about the most mainstream medical organization on the planet) does not necessarily approve of, for which there are no established doses or LD50's. Why is the author so insistent on the notion of LD50's when so many people have taken natural products for hundreds of years without ill-effect (that's a pretty amazing safety standard, in a way -- the fact that people without any scientific background have safely taken and studied natural products without modern science; namely by studying themselves; in India and China there were masters at this sort of art). Sorry for such a long response. I hope someone appreciates these comments. EDIT: I just want to add one other thing. Rofecoxib (better known as Vioxx) has an established LD50. For mice it is 300mg/kg, for rabbits it is 3.2g/kg, and for rats it is 980mg/kg [2]. But you know what? Vioxx exacerbated heart disease for at least thousands of people and should have been recalled years earlier than 2004[1]. An established LD50 does not mean a drug is safe. [1] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)17514-4/fulltext http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... [2] http://www.clearsynth.com/docs/MSD-CS-T-17609.pdf http://www.clearsynth.com/docs/MSD-CS-T-17609.pdf
aheilbut 14y ago
This is true, but totally misses the point of the NYT Magazine article. The 'four marvels' powder was mentioned only in passing. [edited to remove my dig at homeopathy, which wasn't at issue here - it was naturopathy] The more interesting thesis of the original article is that some inflammatory disease is related to a 'leaky gut' syndrome and that it could be modulated by diet and changing gut flora. Unfortunately this argument was not made very rigorously in the article, and while it remains controversial there is a lot of ongoing research into the idea.
- nikatwork 14y ago
  > if it was homeopathic, we can be quite certain that it was doing nothing at all. From TFA: >several recent peer-reviewed studies have shown that at least one of the active drugs in four-marvels powder, quercetin, exhibits anti-inflammatory activity. Dismissing all traditional treatments without using research is just as woo-ey as blindly accepting them.
  - short_circut 14y ago
    Actually if it was homeopathic we really can be certain that it would do nothing at all. Maybe the person you were responding to didn't quite state it clearly. I don't believe either that commenter or the article refereed to it as a homeopathic remedy. I won't get into why a homeopathic remedy can't work. It should be pretty obvious just based on what homeopathy claims
  - aheilbut 14y ago
    Whoops. I misread 'naturopath' as 'homeopath'. When you dilute something 10e60-fold, I'm comfortable dismissing it, and it's not woo-ey at all. But that wasn't the case here. I didn't mean to imply that traditional treatments can't contain active ingredients that can be useful -- they surely can, and are the source of many drugs.
    - derleth 14y ago
      You can’t have naturopathy without homeopathy: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/01/28/you-cant-have-naturopathy-without-homeop/ http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/01/28/you-cant-have-n... > the NPLEX (Naturopathic Physicians Licensing Examinations), which is required for naturopaths to be licensed in the 16 states in the U.S. and 5 provinces in Canada that license naturopathic physicians tests naturopaths on homeopathy > Then there’s the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP). If you take a look at its blog and search it for the word “homeopathy, you’ll rapidly see that the largest “professional” organization of naturopaths not only embraces homeopathy but defends it against attacks.
lizzard 14y ago
So many people earnestly want to tell me how if I just drink the right cherry juice, or do acupuncture, I will magically be fixed. It is very annoying. Rather than take someone's anecdotes and try them one after another it seems more sensible to look over the last 20 years or so of research papers and decide on treatment based on that. Also, 6 weeks on methotrexate is not a very long trial.
- rdtsc 14y ago
  You could do worse than just not get "fixed". You could be harmed. Natural and safe are fairly independent concepts.
dools 14y ago
When Meadows’ husband has serious reservations about her desire to ditch the advice of not one, but two, pediatric rheumatologists, Meadows implies he was the poorly informed one: “I was nervous about keeping Shepherd on methotrexate, but Darin didn’t share my squeamishness. He has always been more comfortable with pharmaceuticals, more trusting in general.” If you read the original article, you'll see that she didn't "ditch" the advice. She kept giving her son the prescribed medication. She discussed "Walker's Regimen" with Dr. Kahn who approved it in conjunction with methotrexate. Dr. Immundo gave her the number of a complementary practitioner. The parents agreed that they would wait 6 weeks without increasing the dosage. They did that, their kid got better. Seems like a perfectly sensible course of action to me. I think even though Michelle M. Francl (author of the OP) touts her self as a "scientist" her article is just as influenced by emotion as the original article she's referencing. The only valid point she makes is that Susannah Meadows refers to the use of "four-miracles powder" as a "drug free" solution. Cool, that's inaccurate and pointing out that chemicals in "magically named" complementary medicines are just chemicals the same as any other is a valuable discussion to have. But she allows a really derisive and dismissive attitude to creep into her writing which has no place in scientific discourse. I realise that Meadows' article is just as emotive, but at no point does she try and take the intellectual high ground. TL;DR: we sought advice from everyone, tried everything, and our son got better as a result. Win.
Meatball_py 14y ago
I'm just wondering if there's any relationship between the picture and the article.
praptak 14y ago
Fear of chemicals in general? Silly, but that is a bit of a strawman. Fear of ingesting synthesized chemicals in quantities to which our species has not been exposed during its evolution? Count me in, with the obvious rational disclaimers.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Does this not apply equally to ingesting any chemicals that humans have not been exposed to during our evolution? What about tea and coffee? Or beer and wine? Or tomatoes? Or capsaicin?
  - praptak 14y ago
    It's the "with the obvious rational disclaimers" part. The above chemicals have been extensively field tested. Huge numbers of people have eaten them for a long long time, it's safe to assume any ill effects of these are known (although obviously the natural selection had little time to adapt us humans to these substances.)
    - InclinedPlane 14y ago
      How do you feel about vaccines? Anti-biotics? Why is fear justified? Isn't the appropriate response reason and critical thinking? FDA approved drugs have been extensively field tested as well. And many "dangerous" chemicals are actually safer than, say, wine. You're just trying to justify your fear of the unfamiliar. It's parochial and small-minded. Do you think that the people who discovered tea, beer, tomatoes, and cheese thought that way? Imagine how much smaller and less interesting our lives would be today if these sorts of fears had gripped our ancestors, and how much smaller our future will be if we allow them free reign today.
      - praptak 14y ago
        > How do you feel about vaccines? Anti-biotics? Both extensively tested, although antibiotics are interesting because they created drug-resistant strains. Which shows that it is rational to be on the lookout for unexpected bad effects of new things in general. > Why is fear justified? Isn't the appropriate response reason and critical thinking? Never stated it's one or the other. Fear of ill effects is what makes us do the whole critical evaluation, which is good. > You're just trying to justify your fear of the unfamiliar. I'm afraid you have read from my comments something that wasn't there at all. "Fear until reasonably tested" = rational. "Fear that makes one ignore all evidence" = obviously irrational. > Do you think that the people who discovered tea, beer, tomatoes, and cheese thought that way? They took the risk and won - good for us. I'm just against calling their fellow tribesmen (or countrymen) irrational, especially those who already knew about death caps & similar.
ck2 14y ago
In the same breath you should also not assume any doctor is an impartial scientist. Doctors are humans and are therefore also subject to being lazy, greedy, ignorant, etc. Just because they seem to have more knowledge and use something of a scientific method doesn't mean they aren't locked into their ways, always giving the same kind of diagnosis for certain symptoms without questioning their limited knowledge. They also face pressure from insurance and government agencies to behave in certain manners. As many of us are coders, let me put it this way - have you ever looked up to another coder because they seemed to know so much more than you? Then after some years you surpassed them in your knowledge and looked back on their code and realized it was a "bit cr*p" in parts? Yeah well your doctor is like that too. If they aren't constantly learning and researching, they are set in their ways and being moved by forces that may not make the best decisions for your health.
- Zakharov 14y ago
  At the same time, consider that anyone peddling herbal remedies and the like is almost guaranteed not to be an impartial scientist.
- carbocation 14y ago
  How does your position affect your reaction to the contents of this article?
rgo 14y ago
My sister is a recently turned vegetarian. As her meat-eater engineer older brother, it's my insolent duty to explain to her that carbon chains like protein are all the same, come it from a bean or a cow. Chickens are no more than organic machines that turn molecules around so they taste rich, especially when deep fried and extra crusty. Needless to say, that won't do anything to change her mind -- not that she has to, it's just me being a pain in the butt gaucho. She is a vegetarian for a myriad of subjective reasons that I could never even start to debase or crack. I've never heard of chemophobia (and the Chrome spell-checker hasn't either), but I think that turning a desperate quest by a mother into a bunch of molecules and atoms is an oversimplification of a complex, subjective choice made by complex, subjective minds.
largesse 14y ago
It's a good article. Human beings are wired to believe that things that are "natural" or "pure" are better than things that are "artificial." It's a quality of human nature that seems to show up in all cultures. Steven Pinker lists many of them in The Blank Slate. It pretty much explains the huge market in "organic" food. Since people have a bias for the "natural" it is hard to have any sort of a conversation about what chemicals might be good for you that don't occur naturally. And, people are unduly scared of "artificial" chemicals while turning a blind eye toward the dangers than many "natural" chemicals have. Inclination toward "natural" makes a lot of sense as an evolved bias. Doubtless, it kept our ancestors alive. But our bodies don't have any sort of magical scanner to detect whether something is natural or not, they simply reacts in mixed ways. To us, some of those reactions are positive or negative, even for the same chemical.
jchrisa 14y ago
The gist of the nytimes article was "don't eat poison" -- eg subtract stuff. Arguments against superstitious and irrelevant additives are missing the point.
nicholassmith 14y ago
Here's the thing, if you're taking medical advice from someone who isn't a practising doctor, you're probably an idiot. All those natural herbs and old wives tale remedies? Scientists actually have checked those and turned them into actual medicines where they worked. Everything else is a load of crap.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  Like aspirin, for example.
Nursie 14y ago
I'm just going to leave this here ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U (Tim Minchin's "Storm")
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  Ah, old but good: "Alternative Medicine has, by definition, not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. You know what we call alternative medicine that works? Medicine."
Apreche 14y ago
I upvoted this because the article is GOOD, whoever wrote the title of this submission needs some good old fashioned http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

114 points by tokenadult 14y ago

Startup idea: take out-of-patent medicines, rebrand them as herbal remedies, triple the markup, get a reputation as selling "safe" herbal remedies that work particularly well.

addlepate 14y ago

Saying that everything is comprised of chemicals reminds me of the complaint that the phrase "could care less" is the logical opposite of the way people use it. True in a narrow sense, sure, but willfully ignorant of what people are actually trying to convey. This kind of thinking drives me batty, and people who fancy themselves scientists seem to enjoy indulging in it. "Technically right" isn't the best kid of right, it's the worst. (If you're interested in the "care less" thing, check out "The Language Mavens" chapter from The Language Instinct by Pinker.)

electic 14y ago

How about, "Don't take any medical advice from any magazine?" Now why is that? Well because it is a run of the mill magazine. I am not sure why people read and follow this stuff.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
The slate article isn't providing any medical advice, it's merely telling people that they shouldn't fear synthetically manufactured medicines while being completely trusting of naturopathic ones. If anything it's telling people to be more informed, skeptical, and to use reason rather than emotion when making informed choices about medicine.
- electic 14y ago
  Yes, I got that. However, it is still medical advice...coming from a magazine. What to "fear", "use", or any other word you can swap in there is still the same thing....advice.

hecuba12 14y ago

Don't take any advice from Slate.

capkutay 14y ago

If I believed journalistic health advice I'd think Ice cream is good for me because it speeds up my metabolism but exercising is bad because it makes me eat too much.

Alex3917 14y ago

"Another common chemical name for methotrexate is amethopterin, which comes from the roots meth, Greek for wine, which I might stretch to spirits, and pterin, Greek for feathers." Except for it's ameth, which would mean lack of intoxication, a la 'amethyst'. In fact the whole article is complete BS as it doesn't even remotely align with the views the author presents in the original article -- nowhere does the author say that she is 'chemophobic', nor is this even hinted at beyond her saying that her husband has always been "more comfortable with pharmaceuticals, more trusting in general." And of course naturopathic medicine is going to seem like pure evil if you're willfully blinding yourself to the arguments in its favor and only seeing the (legitimate) weaknesses, as will anything else for that matter.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Except the NYT magazine article author makes it quite clear that she is chemophobic, with repeated statements about her fear. Here's a direct quote: "It reinforced an image of Shepherd as sick, forever dependent on a drug I felt afraid of, however unreasonable a doctor might tell me that fear was." Similarly, when a doctor suggests increasing the dose of methotrexate she panics.
- Alex3917 14y ago
  I guess I still don't see anything there that could be construed as 'chemophobia'. She doesn't want her kid to self-identify as sick or to die of liver failure. I don't see how either of these concerns are crazy or anti-technology or whatever. Especially since in the beginning she says she was excited about the diagnosis because it meant they could try different drugs.
carbocation 14y ago
Is there objective evidence that any element of naturopathic medicine has consistent, reproducible, positive value?
- Alex3917 14y ago
  By element do you mean a specific plant or the broader principles of naturopathy?

ars 14y ago

addlepate: Your account has been banned, and almost no one can see your posts. To reply to you: I challenge you to define "chemical" in the way you are attempting to redefine it. People want to use it to describe unsafe or non-natural compounds, but a little bit of thinking will quickly show that that definition is impossible. Use chemical as an adjective instead of a noun and you will do much better. Used as a noun chemical has no meaning: Everything is a chemical, so saying the word says nothing at all.

addlepate 14y ago
I know that, but thank you. Let us agree to disagree.
robotresearcher 14y ago
Some non-chemical things: Justice, beauty, truth, prime numbers, O(log n) insertion time of a binary tree, Beethoven's 5th. Just for the record.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ars 14y ago
  Those aren't things, they are concepts.
  - robotresearcher 14y ago
    And a concept isn't a thing? This is an old philosophical debate that pretty much melts away in practice. For all practical purposes things like songs and ideas are things. See how you weren't confused when I referred to them as things in the previous sentence?

tokenadult 14y ago

From the article: "We are a chemophobic culture. Chemical has become a synonym for something artificial, adulterated, hazardous, or toxic. Chemicals are bad—for you, for your children, for the environment. But whatever chemophobics would like to think, there is no avoiding chemicals, no way to create chemical-free zones. Absolutely everything is made of atoms and molecules; it’s all chemistry." This was striking to me, as I had seen an example just recently elsewhere in cyberspace of reasoning that "chemicals" are bad ingredients to have in a food, even though all foods are materials made up of, um, chemicals. I have seen similar comments earlier here on Hacker News. Matter is made up of atoms, and those atoms form various chemical elements or compounds or mixtures. We breath chemicals, we eat chemicals, we touch chemicals every day. Just because some foodstuffs have listed ingredients, with names that are sometimes difficult to read out loud (I have no trouble with the names, but then again I grew up with a parent who majored in chemistry) doesn't mean that those foods are dangerous. Whatever kind of food you think is perfectly safe surely contains some compounds with chemical names that are hard to spell or pronounce, but are nevertheless perfectly "natural," and usually not listed on an ingredients label. Don't worry about it.

jacques_chester 14y ago
My favourite example was a "natural" shampoo bottle I saw: "100% Chemical Free!" My joke about selling bottles of hard vacuum didn't seem to hurt their sales.
- drakeandrews 14y ago
  There was a company in the UK that did that, and got pounced on by Trading Standards. They now say something equally stupid, but less offensive to the powers that be.
bane 14y ago
Please don't even get me started on "natural" or "processed foods".
- sliverstorm 14y ago

passionfruit 14y ago

This article makes some bad analogies. Showing the structure of two different molecules and acting aghast that someone would choose one over the other is like saying all digital information is 1's and 0's so it's all the same. Or it's like saying all words are just a bunch of the same letters therefore they have no meaning.

wvenable 14y ago
Choosing one over the other because of how they are named is ridiculous -- not because of their composition.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
The point being that people react to the name and the classification ("natural" vs "chemical"), and they should be reacting to the scientifically verified effects and side-effects.

OGinparadise 14y ago

Don’t Take Medical Advice From the New York Times Magazine Don’t Take Medical Advice From the Slate Magazine either. Research all you want but call a doctor in the end.

snowwrestler 14y ago
> call a doctor in the end Which is the point of this article.

leoh 14y ago

"We are a chemophobic culture." I take great issue with this statement. We are most decidedly not a chemophobic culture. People are more than willing to take medicines that are artificially synthesized and, as the author mentions, with good reason. I, for one, am not chemophobic. I personally know an individual who developed one of the first total-syntheses (i.e. "artificial" chemical synthesis) of a very important anti-cancer agent, Taxol. The TS of Taxol was exceedingly important, since a single dose required the sacrifice of an mature Yew tree -- something that would have been entirely unfeasible for the millions of people that stood to benefit from the drug. But there are miraculous, mysterious things that we do not understand about natural products and the human body. Take Yerba Maté, for example, a popular beverage in Argentina and coffee. Or wine and whiskey. What all these beverages have in common is that they rely on a principal chemical agent for their effect (methylxanthine or caffeine in the case of Yerba Maté and Coffee; ethanol in the case of wine or your favorite alcohol). Yet as the more sensitive among us have realized, each different concoction effects us differently -- even though the principal ingredient is the same (people report calming, yet stimulating effects from Yerba Maté as opposed to caffeine, etc.)! It turns out there is a very simple explanation for this. There are other constellations of chemicals in these concoctions which, in concert create an altogether particular and unique effect. This, I believe, is where "chemophobia" lies for some individuals (though again, I argue it is not widespread among the greater population). It lies in the fact that we are applying something very strong in a way that is not balanced or integrated. One very real mainstream example of this is how calcium is accompanied by vitamin D, as the latter enhances absorption of the the former. Since vitamin D helps strengthen the effect of calcium, patients can take safer doses of calcium which have great physiological effect. Another example is the fact that African American heart patients who take ACE inhibitors (drugs that lower blood pressure) along with diuretics have much, much better clinical outcomes than taking ACE inhibitors alone, which is the standard of treatment for most individuals. The hope, then, is that when taking something more "natural" as opposed to man-made is that that natural product will inherently contain a wider variety of compounds that taken together create a more potent, but gentle effect on the patient. Now of course, these effects could be created by taking combinations of man-made products. But first these combinations need to be discovered, and we are certainly a long ways off from that. And it is not easy--different people are affected by different combinations and deciphering the key players out of a set of natural products is not easy. This will take many more years of careful, non-biased research. And there is indeed incredible bias against natural products among mainstream medical establishment, which is rather absurd given that so many of the drugs we take today come from natural sources! To me this is the real travesty, not "chemophobia." Moreover, we need to embrace treatments that work, even if we can't explain them (provided that they are safe--more on this and LD50's in a moment). Good scientists work with existing knowledge. Great scientists love the perplexing, paradoxical, seemingly impossible phenomena that are not well characterized, which the FDA (about the most mainstream medical organization on the planet) does not necessarily approve of, for which there are no established doses or LD50's. Why is the author so insistent on the notion of LD50's when so many people have taken natural products for hundreds of years without ill-effect (that's a pretty amazing safety standard, in a way -- the fact that people without any scientific background have safely taken and studied natural products without modern science; namely by studying themselves; in India and China there were masters at this sort of art). Sorry for such a long response. I hope someone appreciates these comments. EDIT: I just want to add one other thing. Rofecoxib (better known as Vioxx) has an established LD50. For mice it is 300mg/kg, for rabbits it is 3.2g/kg, and for rats it is 980mg/kg [2]. But you know what? Vioxx exacerbated heart disease for at least thousands of people and should have been recalled years earlier than 2004[1]. An established LD50 does not mean a drug is safe. [1] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)17514-4/fulltext http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... [2] http://www.clearsynth.com/docs/MSD-CS-T-17609.pdf http://www.clearsynth.com/docs/MSD-CS-T-17609.pdf

aheilbut 14y ago

This is true, but totally misses the point of the NYT Magazine article. The 'four marvels' powder was mentioned only in passing. [edited to remove my dig at homeopathy, which wasn't at issue here - it was naturopathy] The more interesting thesis of the original article is that some inflammatory disease is related to a 'leaky gut' syndrome and that it could be modulated by diet and changing gut flora. Unfortunately this argument was not made very rigorously in the article, and while it remains controversial there is a lot of ongoing research into the idea.

nikatwork 14y ago
> if it was homeopathic, we can be quite certain that it was doing nothing at all. From TFA: >several recent peer-reviewed studies have shown that at least one of the active drugs in four-marvels powder, quercetin, exhibits anti-inflammatory activity. Dismissing all traditional treatments without using research is just as woo-ey as blindly accepting them.
- short_circut 14y ago
  Actually if it was homeopathic we really can be certain that it would do nothing at all. Maybe the person you were responding to didn't quite state it clearly. I don't believe either that commenter or the article refereed to it as a homeopathic remedy. I won't get into why a homeopathic remedy can't work. It should be pretty obvious just based on what homeopathy claims
- aheilbut 14y ago
  Whoops. I misread 'naturopath' as 'homeopath'. When you dilute something 10e60-fold, I'm comfortable dismissing it, and it's not woo-ey at all. But that wasn't the case here. I didn't mean to imply that traditional treatments can't contain active ingredients that can be useful -- they surely can, and are the source of many drugs.
  - derleth 14y ago
    You can’t have naturopathy without homeopathy: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/01/28/you-cant-have-naturopathy-without-homeop/ http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/01/28/you-cant-have-n... > the NPLEX (Naturopathic Physicians Licensing Examinations), which is required for naturopaths to be licensed in the 16 states in the U.S. and 5 provinces in Canada that license naturopathic physicians tests naturopaths on homeopathy > Then there’s the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (AANP). If you take a look at its blog and search it for the word “homeopathy, you’ll rapidly see that the largest “professional” organization of naturopaths not only embraces homeopathy but defends it against attacks.

lizzard 14y ago

So many people earnestly want to tell me how if I just drink the right cherry juice, or do acupuncture, I will magically be fixed. It is very annoying. Rather than take someone's anecdotes and try them one after another it seems more sensible to look over the last 20 years or so of research papers and decide on treatment based on that. Also, 6 weeks on methotrexate is not a very long trial.

rdtsc 14y ago
You could do worse than just not get "fixed". You could be harmed. Natural and safe are fairly independent concepts.

dools 14y ago

When Meadows’ husband has serious reservations about her desire to ditch the advice of not one, but two, pediatric rheumatologists, Meadows implies he was the poorly informed one: “I was nervous about keeping Shepherd on methotrexate, but Darin didn’t share my squeamishness. He has always been more comfortable with pharmaceuticals, more trusting in general.” If you read the original article, you'll see that she didn't "ditch" the advice. She kept giving her son the prescribed medication. She discussed "Walker's Regimen" with Dr. Kahn who approved it in conjunction with methotrexate. Dr. Immundo gave her the number of a complementary practitioner. The parents agreed that they would wait 6 weeks without increasing the dosage. They did that, their kid got better. Seems like a perfectly sensible course of action to me. I think even though Michelle M. Francl (author of the OP) touts her self as a "scientist" her article is just as influenced by emotion as the original article she's referencing. The only valid point she makes is that Susannah Meadows refers to the use of "four-miracles powder" as a "drug free" solution. Cool, that's inaccurate and pointing out that chemicals in "magically named" complementary medicines are just chemicals the same as any other is a valuable discussion to have. But she allows a really derisive and dismissive attitude to creep into her writing which has no place in scientific discourse. I realise that Meadows' article is just as emotive, but at no point does she try and take the intellectual high ground. TL;DR: we sought advice from everyone, tried everything, and our son got better as a result. Win.

Meatball_py 14y ago

I'm just wondering if there's any relationship between the picture and the article.

praptak 14y ago

Fear of chemicals in general? Silly, but that is a bit of a strawman. Fear of ingesting synthesized chemicals in quantities to which our species has not been exposed during its evolution? Count me in, with the obvious rational disclaimers.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Does this not apply equally to ingesting any chemicals that humans have not been exposed to during our evolution? What about tea and coffee? Or beer and wine? Or tomatoes? Or capsaicin?
- praptak 14y ago
  It's the "with the obvious rational disclaimers" part. The above chemicals have been extensively field tested. Huge numbers of people have eaten them for a long long time, it's safe to assume any ill effects of these are known (although obviously the natural selection had little time to adapt us humans to these substances.)
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    How do you feel about vaccines? Anti-biotics? Why is fear justified? Isn't the appropriate response reason and critical thinking? FDA approved drugs have been extensively field tested as well. And many "dangerous" chemicals are actually safer than, say, wine. You're just trying to justify your fear of the unfamiliar. It's parochial and small-minded. Do you think that the people who discovered tea, beer, tomatoes, and cheese thought that way? Imagine how much smaller and less interesting our lives would be today if these sorts of fears had gripped our ancestors, and how much smaller our future will be if we allow them free reign today.
    - praptak 14y ago
      > How do you feel about vaccines? Anti-biotics? Both extensively tested, although antibiotics are interesting because they created drug-resistant strains. Which shows that it is rational to be on the lookout for unexpected bad effects of new things in general. > Why is fear justified? Isn't the appropriate response reason and critical thinking? Never stated it's one or the other. Fear of ill effects is what makes us do the whole critical evaluation, which is good. > You're just trying to justify your fear of the unfamiliar. I'm afraid you have read from my comments something that wasn't there at all. "Fear until reasonably tested" = rational. "Fear that makes one ignore all evidence" = obviously irrational. > Do you think that the people who discovered tea, beer, tomatoes, and cheese thought that way? They took the risk and won - good for us. I'm just against calling their fellow tribesmen (or countrymen) irrational, especially those who already knew about death caps & similar.

ck2 14y ago

In the same breath you should also not assume any doctor is an impartial scientist. Doctors are humans and are therefore also subject to being lazy, greedy, ignorant, etc. Just because they seem to have more knowledge and use something of a scientific method doesn't mean they aren't locked into their ways, always giving the same kind of diagnosis for certain symptoms without questioning their limited knowledge. They also face pressure from insurance and government agencies to behave in certain manners. As many of us are coders, let me put it this way - have you ever looked up to another coder because they seemed to know so much more than you? Then after some years you surpassed them in your knowledge and looked back on their code and realized it was a "bit cr*p" in parts? Yeah well your doctor is like that too. If they aren't constantly learning and researching, they are set in their ways and being moved by forces that may not make the best decisions for your health.

Zakharov 14y ago
At the same time, consider that anyone peddling herbal remedies and the like is almost guaranteed not to be an impartial scientist.
carbocation 14y ago
How does your position affect your reaction to the contents of this article?

rgo 14y ago

My sister is a recently turned vegetarian. As her meat-eater engineer older brother, it's my insolent duty to explain to her that carbon chains like protein are all the same, come it from a bean or a cow. Chickens are no more than organic machines that turn molecules around so they taste rich, especially when deep fried and extra crusty. Needless to say, that won't do anything to change her mind -- not that she has to, it's just me being a pain in the butt gaucho. She is a vegetarian for a myriad of subjective reasons that I could never even start to debase or crack. I've never heard of chemophobia (and the Chrome spell-checker hasn't either), but I think that turning a desperate quest by a mother into a bunch of molecules and atoms is an oversimplification of a complex, subjective choice made by complex, subjective minds.

largesse 14y ago

It's a good article. Human beings are wired to believe that things that are "natural" or "pure" are better than things that are "artificial." It's a quality of human nature that seems to show up in all cultures. Steven Pinker lists many of them in The Blank Slate. It pretty much explains the huge market in "organic" food. Since people have a bias for the "natural" it is hard to have any sort of a conversation about what chemicals might be good for you that don't occur naturally. And, people are unduly scared of "artificial" chemicals while turning a blind eye toward the dangers than many "natural" chemicals have. Inclination toward "natural" makes a lot of sense as an evolved bias. Doubtless, it kept our ancestors alive. But our bodies don't have any sort of magical scanner to detect whether something is natural or not, they simply reacts in mixed ways. To us, some of those reactions are positive or negative, even for the same chemical.

jchrisa 14y ago

The gist of the nytimes article was "don't eat poison" -- eg subtract stuff. Arguments against superstitious and irrelevant additives are missing the point.

nicholassmith 14y ago

Here's the thing, if you're taking medical advice from someone who isn't a practising doctor, you're probably an idiot. All those natural herbs and old wives tale remedies? Scientists actually have checked those and turned them into actual medicines where they worked. Everything else is a load of crap.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
Like aspirin, for example.

Nursie 14y ago

I'm just going to leave this here ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U (Tim Minchin's "Storm")

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
Ah, old but good: "Alternative Medicine has, by definition, not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. You know what we call alternative medicine that works? Medicine."

Apreche 14y ago

I upvoted this because the article is GOOD, whoever wrote the title of this submission needs some good old fashioned http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/