Folk medicines contain lead

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According to article, some are in fact mostly lead: Folk medicines contain lead

Folk medicines are crap - they're not tested properly and their contents vary from one place to another.

The use of such medicines is downright irresponsible.

*SARCASM ON*

That is a bunch of lies by the Evil Big Pharma Conspiracy! Ancient Wisdom understands a lot more then Reductionistic Western Science!! !

*SARCASM OFF*

People have used and relied on these medicines for thousands of years. Some are going to be harmful just like modern drugs are harmful (although I don't think you'll find a folk remedy that killed thousands of people like some modern drugs)

For those Big Pharma supporters, it's extremely arrogant to dismiss all these folk remedies as placebo effects. If you lived 200 years ago, would you really have refused all medical treatment simply because there weren't top quality, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies that conclusively proved any of them effective?

Well, if I were transported back to the Middle Ages, I would certainly refuse medical treatment, since it was generally either completely ineffective or more dangerous than illness. Examples: bleeding (not usually the best thing to do to a weakened organism), pouring boiling oil on wounds (which European doctors did until a Swiss doctor ran out of oil and discovered unburnt wounds healed better and faster). Examples from other places: ALL surgery before surgeons started to systematically use soap (more likely to kill the patient due to infection than to do any good), believing that chili is better for disinfecting a wound than alcohol or soap, cleansing out evil spirits to 'cure' schizophrenia, etc (a process that is sometimes deadly). As the article points out, lead has no therapeutic properties. Just because it's been around for a long time doesn't mean it's any good.
Not all folk medicine is like that, of course, which is precisely the point of double-blind, placebo-controlled studies - just because a traditional healer or a modern doctor or a pharmaceutical company claims it's a good idea is, in and of itself, no proof - hence why we need evidence-based medicine (not necessarily the same as conventional modern medicine), i.e. it's worth checking if a traditional remedy is any good, but it's foolish to assume it works as anything other than a placebo just because it's traditional (low life expectancy is also traditional).

Oh yes.... arsenic used to be very popular, as was some forms of heavy metals. It's amazing the number of people who poisoned themselves.

I don't dispute that there can be a beneficial effect from some compounds. The difference in buying something from "big pharma" and buying what passes for "folk" remedies these days... if it's from big pharma, the contents are clearly labeled, any fillers are disclosed and you can depend on those things being accurate. If you buy something from the "folk" or organic or homeopathic vendor... it may have been made in China, may not correctly disclose that fact, may or may NOT contain the thing you're trying to buy, and may very well be contaminated with something harmful. As so many pet owners found out a few months ago... and people who bought a toothpaste at a discount store that contained dangerous levels of a poisonous chemical, and the parents who bought their children toys contaminated with lead paint...

The only danger I have in buying from big pharma is, the pharmacy I'm buying from may have received a shipment of counterfeit drugs that were packaged to APPEAR legitimate. It's big business in China. Which is why we need RFID to track legitimate shipments and we need it now, because it's bad enough we have people out there shipping crap to us to just steal money, there are also people out there who want to do us harm... Our imports and our food supplies are horribly vulnerable.

Yes.

Yes I would.

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Last edited by zendell on 26 Jan 2008, 5:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Does anyone realize that the Chinese and Indians use traditional medicine? There's over 1 billion people in both countries. Despite poverty, life expectancy in China is almost as high as the US.

Just because a treatment hasn't been proven effective doesn't mean that it's ineffective and only produces placebo effects? I don't see how anyone can not realize that. I think most of the newer pharmaceutical drugs come from plants. These plants were just as effective before they were studied. Despite what pro-drug people may say, clinical studies don't make treatments more effective.

Studies have found some of Big Pharma's drugs ineffective at treating certain conditions and doctors still prescribe them. Some conventional treatments used by doctors were later found to be useless. I don't see any reason to reject safer, more natural, alternative treatments.

Zendell,

I don't think anyone is disputing the fact that a lot of home remedies work - and many work better than medicines.

Some - the more natural ones - have less side effects than modern medicine.

BOTH have a place in our society.

There's no doubting the effectiveness of the "modern" antibiotic but there's some big costs if you use it all the time.

Similarly, the benefits of vitamin C and garlic have been demonstrated time and time again. - although I have to say that Garlic has a fairly obvious side effect if you're in a relationship

The US actually does rather badly in life expectancy compared with other developed countries. According to wikipedia in the US it's in the range 77.5-80.0, China: 72.5-75 and in India in 67.5-70.0. India is poor but it also has lower obesity rates and a diet low in cholesterol. Cuba, with its emphasis on access to modern medicine, does much better than India. If you take pretty much any country before the arrival/invention of modern medicine and compare life expectancy to what it is now, it will be much, much higher. As I said, low life expectancy and high infant mortality are very traditional.
No, you can't assume traditional remedies are ineffective, but you can't assume they're effective or even safe, either. Just because a bunch of people have thought something is a good idea for along time doesn't mean it really is a good idea. The clinical studies don't make things effective (I've certainly never made that claim), they're there to distinguish the effective ones from the placebos. How else are you going to know which plants are effective and which ones are placebos?
Don't you see a contradiction between claiming traditional remedies don't need to be validated by studies, and criticising big pharma because studies have shown some of their products not to work/be dangerous? Double standards? To be clear, my position is that neither big pharma's wares nor traditional remedies should be accepted without evidence (i.e., reproducible, properly designed studies; neither ads nor bandwagon fallacies count as evidence), not that either one is automatically good/bad. As I posted earlier, conventional medicine is not automatically the same as evidence-based medicine.