Shootie -
First of all, I was not offering medical advice, I was stating an opinion about the proposed regulation of herbal supplements, etc.
Second, I'm not sure why you assume that I know nothing whatsoever about this subject. I do know something about it, and in fact have actually been known to take vitamins and other kinds of supplements (made by reputable manufacturers and recommended by knowledgeable people) over the years to alleviate certain conditions. Yes, they do work sometimes, in my experience.
Here's a good story about alternative medicine.
One of my very oldest friends, a woman who I first met when we were fourteen, one of the great loves of my life, had a problem a few years ago. I'll call her Betty, though that is not her real name. Betty started "spotting" between periods. She consulted her local herbalist, and was given something to clear the problem up. The spotting turned into pretty much constant bleeding over a period of months. The original herbalist, a homeopathic medicine practitioner, and others were consulted, and each offered various remedies which Betty dutifully took as prescribed.
After more than two years, when the bleeding had only increased, Betty finally consulted a medical doctor, after her mother begged her to. The doctor was able to diagnose cervical cancer without needing to do a biopsy, as the tumor was the size of an orange, and easily visible during a routine pelvic inspection. The doctor referred Betty to an oncologist.
But Betty didn't believe in Western Medicine. She consulted more herbalists, psychic healers, etc. I remember that one of the things she tried was a tar-like substance which she was told the Indians had used for centuries to treat all types of cancer. I believe it was taken orally, mixed with hot water.
At one point she called me to say she was in California for a few days. We tried to figure out which day our schedules would coincide so we could get together. Wednesday was out because she had to travel to Long Beach to see a man who had a machine that could "cure all known diseases."
Apparently, this genius had discovered that diseases are cause by "vibrations" and that each disease has a specific frequency. To cure any disease, you just have to discover the frequency at which is vibrating, and use his machine to input the same frequency at the opposite polarity.
The problem with this brilliant discovery is that it's just flat wrong. Diseases are not caused by vibrations and can't be cured by them. (Too bad nobody required him to prove any of his claims before he sold an expensive machine to desperate sick people.)
By the time Betty had exhausted all the avenues of alternative medicine, her cancer had metastasized, and was all over her body. At that point, all Western medicine could do for her was to control her pain with narcotics.
The last time I saw her, she resembled someone from a German concentration camp. She looked like a skeleton with skin, from the waist up. Her legs, however, were hideously swollen. Her feet were the size of soccer balls, and were black and blue. She could not walk, of course. She had a shiny, veiny, blue-grey tumor sticking out of the top of her head. It was the size and shape of a chicken egg.
All this despite the fact that some kind of "healer" had been by the previous week, gone through a hand-waving routine, and pronounced her "cured". The healer said, "You are cured, but you just don't know it yet. All you have to do is get out of bed." Betty's husband told me that when the healer had said that, he had hardly been able to keep himself from murdering her.
When I asked her how she was feeling, she said cheerfully, "I don't feel so hot, but at least I'm still cute!"
She died a few weeks later.
Contrast her experience with mine. I had some bleeding. After a couple of doctors had told me it was just my hemorrhoids acting up, I went to my regular physician and mentioned it to him. He got me in to see a colorectal surgeon the next day. The short version of the story is that I was diagnosed with colon cancer, stage 2. I followed the surgeon's advice and underwent chemo and radiation therapy, followed by surgery. To say that the treatments were unpleasant would understate the case by a fair margin. But I am now alive and cancer free.
My takeaway is that alternative medicine is not all good, and Western medicine is not all bad.
And I still think that companies should be accountable for the claims that they make about the contents and the efficacy of the products they manufacture.
- Allen |
