Morning Ed: Health {2018.02.06.T}
[He1] The UK is dealing with a nursing shortage.
[He2] Eli Lilly’s much touted effort to as screening mechanisms.”>rid the world of Alzheimer’s was a failure, but maybe we can learn from it.
[He3] This seems like a great idea and I wish it well.
[He4] Maurizio Plescia got an allergy to some medicine and ended up being on cigarette packs as a warning against smoking.
[He5] The efficacy of kissing the booboo will never cease to surprise (and delight) me. (Yes, yes, I know that says more about homeopathy than booboo-kissing, but still.)
[He6] It’s like “kiss the booboo“, except for grownup women giving birth.
[He7] Speaking of giving birth… dear lord.
[He8] This is a pretty amazing story. (Well, many amazing stories.)
He2: The link is mangled.
He8: Tangentially, qualifying as a plasma donor has an additional physical hurdle: suitable veins. When I volunteered, they inspected my arms and told me that I lacked a suitable length of vein straight enough to use for apheresis.Report
He3: This reminds me how doctors in Japan have their own pharmacies. You go to the doctor and get the drugs there. Hospitals having their own drug companies is a supped up version.
He7: This sounds horrible.Report
This seems to be generally true in Asia. Singaporean doctors also have their own in-house pharmacies. But there are still pharma chains.Report
He3 isn’t about hospitals having pharmacies, it’s about hospitals owning the means of production!
Damn medical commies*!
*PS I think this is a great idea. If the market is failing to provide the good you want at the price you want, then you should seek a new market, even if you have to create it yourself. I wouldn’t mind seeing a collective like this becoming more common, and being the preferred type of producer for off-patent drugs, or for the FDA program that hands out IP rights to older drugs. It would be nice to stop hearing stories about price spikes of common drugs because a pharma-bro got greedy.Report
[He5] Nitpick, but kissing the booboo is Naturopathic not Homeopathic.
Homeopathic is a very particular (and peculiar to my mind) notion of medicine. The Homeo part is the key root… it is the (recent) theory that *like cures like* with (wildly diluted) tinctures. So you have to important parts: 1) Like and 2) the virtual (if not actual) absence of the Like in the tincture/powder. Actual homeopaths are pretty gosh darn rare in my experience.
Most people here (from what I’ve read) are Natruopathic in a complementary way to conventional medicine. Naturopathy encompasses holistic, alternative, meditative and natural practices that are more closely associated with maintaining health or dealing with chronic issues rather than treating acute symptoms.
I often see Homeopathy incorrectly used as the umbrella term for Natural/Alternative/Complementary medicine… but that’s not right, its a very particular subset that in my experience is not widely practiced even among those strongly committed to Naturopathy.
I suspect it is the homonym “Home” which people link to home based medicine.Report
The article compared boo-boo kissing to homeopathy, though.Report
Having a boo boo kissed is a very dilute form of getting a boo boo, though.Report
SIREN SIREN SIREN Homeopathy works SIREN SIREN SIREN must credit pillsyReport
Oh my.Report
The article, like most articles referencing Homeopathy, is wrong. 🙂Report
@marchmaine Given that it’s a U of Pittsburgh study and they went to the trouble of digging up Ullman, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were comparing, specifically, homeopathy, to the naturopathic remedy of booboo kissing. Pointing out that homeopathy is no more effective than love is a standard of anti-homeopathy studies, if not usually so pointedly as this.Report
(Man, I wrote a whole long thing about how homeopathy is bunkus and the secret to its popularity (which is greater in my environs than in Marchmaine’s) is BOOZE, with personal anecdotes…. and the internet ate it. Suffice it to say, any “remedy” that is 40 proof alcohol, as the homeopathic one I was most recently offered was, will probably have more alcohol-based effects than homeopathic ones.)Report
I see what you are saying… I first read it at the Kiss was the Homeopathy, since they didn’t indicate what Homeopathic remedy was used … but it seems they were comparing [unreported] Homeopathic thing with a kiss.
So, I’ll still stand by my nit as a useful distinction that usually isn’t made, but I’ll have to rescind my comment that the article was *wrong* to the article was insufficient.Report
Conversely, I see a lot of homeopaths try to pass themselves off as naturopaths (by combining their homeopathic practices with naturopathic ones and lumping it all under the naturopathic banner).Report
Sure, I see this a bit, but honestly real homeopathy is sooo unlike what most people think of as Naturopathy that once you’re exposed to it you never make that mistake again.
What I think is really more common is that simple tincture making and various organic/traditional remedies are interchanged between Homeo and Naturo. That’s one of the reasons I like to help distinguish between the two… conflating Homeo with Naturo is just mainlining Homeo. #resistReport
Exactly. A lot of Naturopathy has some thing there, even if it isn’t well understood (although one must still be careful, there is still an awful lot of woo out there among Naturopaths).
Homeopathy is just pure woo.Report
@oscar-gordon @marchmaine In my disappeared anecdote, I pointed out that 3 shots of 40 proof alcohol a day ARE a pretty good cure for many problems, though not necessarily the ones the patients think they have.
If you are surrounded by theoretically teetotallin’ evangelicals who are down with All Things Alternative Healing (there are more of them than you might think), there is some value in that, IMO. Just not the value the homeopaths think and/or claim there is. More like the value literally provided by those ole snake oil salesmen back in the day (and with similar associated dangers).
Pure woo is the homeopathic tincture at levels not to exceed one drop purist homeopathy (which I’ve seen at close hand, weirdly enough practiced by an acupuncturist who was pretty good at that far more evidence-supported form of naturopathy, and it’s fascinating and resembles religious ritual as much as anything else – 30 years on I can still picture his entire cabinet of incredibly tiny bottles), but that’s not how it gets practiced on the ground much anymore, as far as I can tell. Impure woo is definitely the order of the day….
(Not to disagree that it’s an important distinction, just rattling on basically. Have you guys tried googling homeopathy essential oils? The lectures about how essential oils can kill aka “antidote” homeopathy and stop it from working are … medieval in their splendor. Or maybe it’s only religious studies geeks who would enjoy such things.)Report
Yeah, the boom of essential oil selling that seemed to accompany the mommy-blogging phenomenon hasn’t helped matters either.
None of the natural remedies we make are suspended in alcohol; one of our best performing is a salve of herbs, oil and beeswax that smells like holiday nuts (rosemary n’ stuff) which is a great anti-fungal…better than the commercial stuff (tinactin, lamosil, lotramin, etc) I’ve tested it against.
We also planted a few elderberry shrubs in the garden and this is our first year with Elderberry Syrup… I and my youngest daughter were the only two to take it during flu season… and we’re the only two not to get either of the two flus that hit our family this season. So yeah, we totally proved that myth. Plus, it is delicious. 🙂Report
@marchmaine That’s really cool, I didn’t know you had a sideline (personal? commercial?) in such things.
And I’m all for whatever works effectively, especially if it involves tasty tasty elderberries. As for anti-fungals, I prefer the natural stuff (that has, as yours has, some backing) since I’m significantly less likely to be allergic to it.
One of my favorite people works as a naturopath (various modalities) through a university-based research center in Minneapolis. Sometimes I talk about her work and then people get that “oh, no! woo!!” look in their eyes and then I start explaining all about how she is participating in helping people feel better through *evidence*-based natural methods, as well as the scientific exploration of how the stuff we know *does* work manages to do so, and that she has a science degree, and how she’s basically one of the coolest scientists I know and blah blah blah…. then they get a different look in their eyes (a glazed one) and I know they’re tiring of my fangirling ;).Report
Purely personal; when you have a bit of land and forest, there are a lot of natural resources available to explore and learn… so we have. It helps that out here there are a couple M.D.’s that also practice complementary Naturopathy… and, well, we’ve learned a lot from our Farm Vet.
That might not inspire confidence, but it turns out that vets still study natural remedies for large animals for various practical reasons having to do with cost, dosage, ease of ingestion, topical adhesion, etc. Once you start to learn that poultices the doctor tells you to make with xyz active (natural) ingredients… and you see them working on the animals in your care… whelp, you kinda get over the mindset that it has to be a molecularly formulated pill or shot delivered in a sterile office to be efficacious. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
We’re still fundamentally conventional medicine folks annual check-ups and all that… the things we make mostly replace or augment over-the-counter options… we’re not exactly curing cancer here.Report
@marchmaine Yeah, I hear you. I actually have more gut-level faith in farm vets than I do in doctors (even though I am of course grateful for the doctoring care I’ve gotten and do not desire to see it replaced with veterinary care whatsoever).Report