Herbal Debitchery

You know how everything about you is just wrong, right? Because there is some perfect common vision of what a person should be like, and you don’t match it. So naturally, what you should do is evaluate every way in which you stray from being perfect and find some way to change each and every thing about you until what you are is an amorphous example of average. Are you too moody? Time for some antidepressants, even if we really haven’t figured out what they are doing and why they are doing it. Tits too small? Silicone it up! (as an aside, one of the most common ways people find this site is by searching for silicone butt injections) We have a society right now that craves homogeneous citizens even as it natters on incessantly at its diversity talking points.

Actually, it’s funny enough to think about it, but at least with regards to facial recognition, this is actually how our brains function. We don’t store all that there is to store in a face because that would be wasteful, so we store what deviates from our own perceived norm, which allows us to hold a lot more faces in our mind’s eye. But I digress.

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It’s Like A Grab Bag Of The Stupid

Homophobia. Deprogramming. Catholicism. Homeopathy. I almost don’t know where to begin.

The Union of Catholic Physicians in Germany are offering homeopathic remedies for homosexuality. It’s cute, because they don’t want to look like the hate-mongering bigots they are, so they make sure to state that homosexuality isn’t a disease, just that they have treatment options for them queer inclinations.

Homosexuality is not a disease. Despite protestations to the contrary, homosexuality occurs in other areas of the animal kingdom, and one of our closest cousins, the bonobos, use sex, both homosexual and heterosexual, to relieve tension. It’s a hell of a lot better than beating the crap out of each other. The image of homosexuality as a disease comes from those who believe for whatever reason that it is an unnatural act to be feared. It certainly isn’t a normal behavior for everyone, but for those who are gay, it is much more natural than heterosexual sex.

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Something Is Akimbo With Our Allergies

It’s allergy season, and that got me to thinking. Do you remember when you were a kid, and in the school cafeteria you did things like eating peanut butter sandwiches, and nobody carried epinephrine on them for it? Maybe there was one kid in the class who was deathly allergic to bee stings, but that was about it? Do you remember when allergic reactions meant a few itchy hives? Do you remember a time when you didn’t know what gluten was? Something has changed, but we don’t know what it is yet.

My ex-wife is a great case-in-point. If I remember correctly, it started rather discourteously. We were in flagrante delecto, and she said that she felt some burning “down there”. We examined, and it seemed to be red and itchy. Soon after that, contact with a balloon to her face triggered a similar response of redness and itchiness. But it wouldn’t end there. Any contact with latex and things seemed to get worse to the point of that swelling throat and can’t breath thing that we sadly associate with allergies today. And it isn’t just latex. Today, she has the same reaction if she eats anything that was made on the same continent as a nut, and I believe there are many more things that trigger this reaction.

And it doesn’t seem to be allergies.

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Grave Concerns About Some Courses

I must admit, I totally missed the boat on this one. My good friend and fellow Shillelagh, Brad, handed me a pamphlet for something called Spectacular Saturdays which is being put on by Chinook Learning Services (CLS for the rest of this post). CLS is in some way related to the Calgary Board of Education (CBE), which is the public school board for Calgary. The CBE “provides adult and continuing education through Chinook Learning Services.”

Brad and I had been talking about going to this and choosing one of the courses that we found contentious so that we could absorb it (not insult it and not interrupt or prevent it) and provide our thoughts. I was especially concerned that this was tied so closely to the CBE, which is a publicly funded organization. Unfortunately, May 7 came and went, and I was in the midst of dealing with all the usual stuff in my life and totally missed out on it. Sorry, Brad!

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Parasites (And The Parasites That Treat Them)

Mark Crislip has a really excellent (if rambling) article up at Science-Based Medicine called Parasites that I thought I’d share. It is interesting to me because he is talking about a range of topics at the same time, from a particular set of symptoms to the relationship of CAM to medicine and all sorts of topics in between. It’s definitely worth the read, and it isn’t gross despite being on a topic that would generally make the skin crawl.

Parasites, as Dr. Crislip points out, are a very strange diagnosis in the West, but I’ve heard in the alt med world a lot of people who have claimed to have had them. I honestly never really considered the logic of that before; you hear someone say, “Hey, I have parasites!” and you have to assume that they got this information from some valid source. But is that the case? I guess the next time I hear someone make this sort of allegation, I’ll ask how they wound up with their diagnosis.

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EU Requiring Herbal Regulation

It’s about time, and of course, it comes with all the cringing and moaning that one would expect. The European Union are now requiring that herbal remedy products be licensed with appropriate safety and efficacy proof provided, and that they be prescribed by a licensed herbal practitioner. In other words, they are holding herbal medicine up to a weaker version of what regular medicine has to go through in order to be sold, and that is a very good thing.

The fact of the matter is that there are side effects and potential hazards to these products, and there are a large number of them that have no evidence whatsoever to back up their claims. If I were a consumer of herbal products, I would consider this a significant assist to my ability to make reasonable, informed choices about the products I am taking. I want to know if the thing I am taking could shut down my kidneys. I’m funny that way.

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Questioning Homeopathy

No no no, I am not asking a question that has been dilluted to 30C in water.

PZ Myers has a comment up about Brauer’s Colic Relief, which appears to be an Australian company’s homeopathic cure for colic. I thoroughly agree with his comments on how disgusting it is that a company can attempt to profit off a child’s pain without doing anything to fix it.

However, it underscores a common complaint I have about these packaged homeopathic cures. It seems to me that it flies in the face of what every homeopath claims, and I’m wondering why they stand for it.

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Queen Of The Fruit Flies

I just read an interesting bit of news and thought I would share it. It turns out that researcher Masaki Kamakura has isolated a protein within royal jelly that is integral in the formation of queen bees. Royal jelly, aside from being a major fixture in the alt med community, claiming to boost the immune system, lower cholesterol, and help with inflammatory diseases, is made by and for bees. All bee larvae eat it for the first few days of development, but the queen bee gets it all the time.

Kamakura has published a paper in Nature which describes how he isolated the protein in question, and what happened when he gave it to fruit fly larvae. Essentially, the fruit fly got big. Real big. And he was able to evaluate what genetic trigger he was pushing by exposing the larvae to the protein.

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So Science Never Looks At Natural Remedies, Eh?

That’s one of those great snarking points of the pseudo-scientific community of alternative medicine. Science just doesn’t want to care that natural remedies may have validity. And of course, it’s a patently ridiculous assertion. Science has done a great deal of investigation of natural remedies, and many scientific products are the result of starting with a natural remedy, identifying what it is that makes it effective, and finding a way to synthesize, stabilize, and standardize the parts that work.

Well, earlier this week, Scientific American had a pod cast providing yet another example of their doing just that. The podcast, Manuka Honey Slips Up Some Bacteria discusses the work of some researchers who have found that manuka honey has a lot of very specific benefits that it can offer in terms of bacterial infection. The one that most pricked my eyebrows up was that it appears that manuka honey may have a really significant effect on making MRSA more susceptible to antibiotics. That’s fantastic news, as any serious MRSA infection comes with a very high death rate. So now we have yet another potential (and ZOMG NATURAL!) means to fight what remains a very brutal disease.

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