people who shame modern medicine are shit

[tielan]

Insulin is medicine from a lab. So are anti-depressants. So is the Pill. So are all the drugs that CFS or HIV people need to survive.

DO NOT GIVE ME THAT SHIT ABOUT "REAL MEDICINE COMES FROM THE EARTH NOT FROM A LAB" FUCKER

No, I don't need any of that to survive - but I know a metric fucktonne of people who do.

I'm 100% a gardener, a permaculturist, and someone who thinks we could probably - overall and as a society - do with less medical intervention on occasion. But I also know that many of us survive on a biochemical intervention which was developed in a lab at some point or another.

When you beat people who actually need biomedical intervention in their lives by shaming their supposed rejection of "earth and nature", though, you've lost me entirely.

FTR: It was FB. It was someone I didn't know really well, but had met once. I didn't lose my shit. I was civil. I think. No promises, though.

Comments

[lynnenne]

I have three cousins who would have died as children if not for insulin. So, yeah.

[tielan]

I don't think (rational) people think about stuff like insulin when they post these things. They're thinking "we should have less medical intervention" but then they post things that go off the deep end.

If the post had said "we should have less medical intervention" then, sure, I'd be down with that. But a message of "all lab chemicals are EEEEEEBIL and if you use them, you should be ashamed"? NOPENOPENOPENOPENOPE.

[phyrry]

Eh, I regularly get told "if you just did [x] then you wouldn't need insulin!!" Which is ignorant and annoying but the Just World fallacy is very comforting to the able-bodied.

[tielan]

There are some things that could probably be less pushed upon us - we don't need to wipe down every surface, for instance.

But other advances...yes. They're very useful for, you know, keeping people alive when they'd otherwise die young or live in constant pain (but not for long, because pain is a life-sapper).

[rmc28]

I'm alive because of chemo. But also and less dramatically because c-sections exist and are made safe by antibiotics. (And I *tried* delivering my babies 'naturally', my body wasn't cooperating.)

I'm (mostly) sane and pain-free because my periods are controlled by my hormonal IUD.

Real diseases and death also come from the earth, not a lab.

[tielan]

Yes! Exactly!

And maybe some of the people posting this shite would say "oh, but we only mean the unnecessary lab medicines" and then it's like "well, why didn't you say that at the start instead of tarring all 'lab' medicine with the same brush".

[rmc28]

Also, who are they to say what's 'necessary'? I've had people get arsey about how much painkillers I use, but it's my hands (and other parts) in pain, not theirs.

[wpadmirer]

Thank you! I've had people say that to me and I want to smack them. I have a whole series of genetic weaknesses, plus a dead thyroid. Without medicines, I'd have been dead years ago. So it makes me absolutely crazy when people say, "Oh, you can do it all with herbs and a good diet."

No, you can't. I have an excellent diet, and I'm fit, and yet, my body has failings that nothing fixes EXCEPT medicines developed to deal with my conditions!

[tielan]

I'm one of the lucky ones so far; I got a good genetic blueprint to begin with, and I've had the good fortune to be able to build on it, and never gotten hit by anything major.

That said, I am not everyone else, and to think that everyone else can do what I can do (with all the benefits and advantages I've had) is arrogant and blind to the conditions and states of others, as well as the systems that often stuck them there (eg. a national socialised healthcare model).

So, yeah, it's not all about "herbs and a good diet". We're inextricably a part of our biology as well as the society and environment that made us, which means we're facing a host of things that we had no control over, and which can't be fixed by "natural living".

[james]

I always want to ask them where do they think the lab ingredients come from. (This is not to say every medication from a lab is safe and useful, but not everything growing out of the ground is safe and useful.) tl:dr, people are stupid.

[tielan]

The mentality of "everything must be the way it was before modernity came along" is just poisonous - rose coloured glasses and fuzzy thinking.

[copracat]

Oh dear. Thank you for your service to facts.

[tielan]

We'll see how it goes down later today. If it gets acknowledged at all.

[kore]

Yeah, I am alive because of gamma globulin, c-section and antibiotics, antibiotics, and mood stabilizers/antidepressants, in roughly chronological order.

[tielan]

Thing is, we all are!

And the double-irony is that the woman who posted this lives in my city, which has fluoride in the water. She has excellent white teeth, which she wouldn't have if not for that lab-medicine chemical added the water supply. (There's one country town in NSW that voted not to have fluoride in the water; dentists there and in the surrounding towns make a KILLING there, even with all the same health/hygiene practises.)

[monanotlisa]

I really need to fully delete my Facebook, and not keep it de-activated...

And yes, you sum it up nicely.

[tielan]

I expect that the extremists (right, left, antivax, antimodern, anti-even-questioning-if-everything-is-fine) will win on FB eventually.

*sigh*

Until that day, I'm gonna fight the good fight.

[escritoireazul]

Thank you for saying all this.

[tielan]

It needed to be said. (Although I did say it in less...emphatic...language.

[the_rck]

My general feeling is that running those natural remedies through a lab is a way to standardize the amount of remedy per dose and to know how old the particular set of pills are. A lot of herbal remedies vary in concentration depending on where the plant grew and what the weather was like that season and... They can also have other things in them that vary from place to place.

[tielan]

That certainly works for things that have an equivalent herbal remedy - dispensing an equal dosage is pretty important. And yet for things like insulin (for example) there is no herbal remedy; they have to be made in a lab.

[the_rck]

I was thinking of all the people in the 90s who told me to stop taking SSRIs and use St John's wort (which is, itself, an SSRI) and of the challenges of medical marijuana.

But, yes, some things have to be made in a lab.

[tielan]

Also: how much 'lab' is too much lab? Is it the procedures of laboratories, which could be replicated in many other places - chemical spectra, distillation, chemical bonding. Is it okay to "mad science" it, or is that a no-no, also?

[thothmes]

As part of the fuck-ton (I'm an American so I spell like one) I say thank you. Type 2 diabetes runs strongly on one side of the family, and does not confine itself to the obese and lazy. Should those people die because they need pharmaceuticals from a lab, just because the genetics that probably kept our ancestors alive during the Potato Famine threaten them now? I think not.

[tielan]

I suspect the people posting and reposting this stuff haven't thought it through. They think they're saying "oh, we should use less medicine, like not taking antibiotics at the first sign of a cold" which I quite understand. But many of them don't think about the many ways that laboratory biochemistry help others live their lives in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

[saturnofthemoon]

Thank you for this. I've had multiple people tell me in the past to go off my meds, sometimes almost bullying, and it sucked.

[ninja007]

I am basically homeopathic by nature and training, but there is a point where we all need medicines out of a lab. To think nature will provide everything we need is asinine and they are the ones who should be shamed for being morons.