thomas malloy wrote:
I posted and
Steve Krivit replied
Ignorance, eh? How about information science? IMHO, the islands of
ignorance map should have the U of Maryland in bright red.
Thomas,
Why? Because of his antics with CF?
[ ... ]Then there is his [Parks'] attacks on my right to purchase
herbs. Do I want the Parksie retirement fund to pay for them? No. Is
my taking herbs going to affect his health? No. But he's from the
government, and he's here to help! Spare me. Then there is his attacks
on energy medicine, a subject of which he has less understanding than
does a pig about Easter. All I know is that I have used homeopathic
preparations three times, and it was symptoms gone three out of three.
If someone would give me a few million $, I'd love to run a study, is
that going to happen? don't hold your breath.
There have been quite a number of studies of herbal and homeopathic
remedies ... in Europe.
In fact, some herbal remedies are approved for general use, declared
safe, regulated, and are commonly known to work and may even be
prescribed by ordinary doctors ... in Europe.
In the U.S., in contrast, medicine tends to be tightly regulated by the
mainstream MDs (and, of course, the drug companies), and (presumably!)
in consequence, herbal and homeopathic remedies seem to get quite a bit
less attention.
Socialized medicine is certainly not perfect (witness the current
problems in France, for instance) but if nothing else, it encourages
governments to pay careful attention to inexpensive alternatives. In
contrast, in this country, nobody in power has any financial incentive
to carefully examine "do-it-yourself medicine".
Some homeopathic remedies have been shown to work as well as or better
than conventional treatment. As far as I know, nobody has a clue why
(or at any rate, I sure don't understand why they work) since, unlike
the situation with "convention herbal medicine", the doses in homeopathy
are set low enough to have no effect (according to conventional theory).
