Comment on when ur higher than sagan

• Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  the only valid alternative medicine is animal therapy, it’s fucking wild that we aren’t prescribing kitten baths (that is, laying on the floor and having 50 kittens poured out of a basket onto you) as step #2 for everyone who isn’t allergic.

  like yeah it’s not gonna cure cancer (i mean who knows, imagine if it turns out it does lmao) but gods does it make it easier to bear with things

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• pelespirit@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Just like anything else, there are shady doctors, nurses, etc. and there are shady alternative medicine people. The only reason pharma aren’t using herbs and such is because they can’t patent them. It’s easier to make them consistent as well. I could give you a shit ton of articles on both sides of this discussion.

  The MD’s aren’t even being trained to help people anymore. They’re being trained to survive med school and their student loans. Once they get experience, they’re trained how to deal with insurance companies.

  Our healthcare is in a world of hurt so start looking inward first and fix that.

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  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Big pharma absolutely can patent drugs extracted from herbs. The reason you don’t see lots of them is that lots of them didn’t work very well and the ones that did were all isolated and turned into medicine decades ago, so the patents have expired, and they’re generally sold under medicine-sounding names rather than the names of the plant them came from. E.g. Aspirin was originally made from modified willow extract, and was discovered because willow was a known natural remedy and so was a good candidate for further investigation. Also, the requirement that a newly discovered drug needs to be proven to be effective to be licensed is a big hurdle lots of natural remedies don’t manage to clear.

    Even despite that, though, big pharma does sell natural remedies. The difference is that they don’t claim they’re medicine. If they only claim they’re a food supplement or something else that’s only medicine-adjacent, there’s no requirement to prove efficacy.

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    • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I don’t claim to know everything, but the way you form these sentences is suspect.

      drugs extracted from herbs

      modified willow extract

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      • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Willow bark contains salicin. Things made from willow bark have been used for a very long time as herbal remedies. In the early 1800s, people figured out how to isolate it and also break it down and oxidise it to make salicylic acid. They tried using what they’d extracted as medicine as they knew it had an effect on the body, and that was the height of the bar back then. It generally did much more harm than good, but eventually some things were discovered that it genuinely helped treat. In the late 1800s, people had figured out that if you tried subjecting known bioactive compounds to chemical reactions, sometimes you ended up with a new bioactive compound - that was how diamorphine (heroin) was first synthesised from morphine, for example. Someone tried an esterification reaction with salicylic acid, and got acetylsalicylic acid, and eventually Bayer managed to purify and manufacture it at scale and start selling it as Aspirin once they’d fed it to people and determined it worked as a painkiller.

        It’s a pretty standard 1800s try extracting compounds from herbal remedies, then kill some people with them, then apply basic chemical reactions to create novel compounds, then get lucky and produce a real medicine story. It doesn’t happen anymore because we’ve run out of things to try and you can’t just create new compounds and feed them to people and see what happens anymore - you’ve got to demonstrate that there’s a plausible mode of action against a specific condition before starting human trials.

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• sqgl@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They act as if the alternative practitioners are immune from corruption.

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  • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    “But this supplement was just researched and developed by an exceptionally clever homeschooling mom who wanted to take on big pharma!”

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