29/05: Placebos and worse
I’ve a little limited sympathy for folk—parents especially—who get all antsy about big medicine, Big Science™ injecting stuff into their little darlings, or who start shopping around for alternative ‘cures’ when told by their doctor there isn’t one that actually works yet.
Not so much in the former case, especially, that I still don’t want to smack ‘em sometimes, mind. Please to read up on herd immunity, and why it’s not all about you, and mebbe read up a bit, too, on some of the symptoms and hazards of the rather miserable pathogens you’ve probably never even experienced firsthand, thanks to vaccination programs (and this, too, is probably part of the problem: when the programs work so well and people actually don’t realize what a bloody miserable deal things like whooping cough and polio can be, sure, they get complacent, tho’ I digress.)
In the latter case—those parents whose children have conditions for which treatment options are limited or of limited efficacy or for which there simply are no treatment options—and who then turn to various quacks who’ll sell ‘em a ‘cure’ anyway, my contempt is, I think, rather more focused on the cons, not the parents. Like the faith healers mentioned a few articles back, there’s something intensely revolting about that general form of scam and those who make money from it.
Anyway, still: the anxieties people have about this stuff, fine, I get that, a bit, I think. It’s a big, complicated world, and the biosciences are especially complicated. So there’s something naturally seductive, I’m sure, about folk selling various quack remedies they also tout as ‘natural’, especially…
Ah, as it’s just so much less scary, that ‘natural’ stuff, right? As opposed to images of cold, clean, clinical labs staffed by folk in white coats playing around in scary ways with DNA or some damned thing (the mandatory mad scientist B-movie cliché goes here: ‘You are meddling with things that ought not be meddled with!’), well, as opposed to this, you get these warm fuzzy images of a possibly grandmotherly woman who runs a health food store, bakes apple pies, cools ‘em on the windowsill, then injects those into your little darlings…
… well, she injects that or bleach. Either way…
Bleach, right? That’s not scary. Just a nice, friendly industrial-strength product you use in higher dilutions to make your clothes whiter, and which, if you spill even those concentrations on your skin, you’d better run to the fucking cold water tap and wash it off while you still have your skin on.
The mind boggles. Seriously. Word to the wise: take this lil’ example and keep it in mind. The point being: saying ‘ZOMG! Scary big science is scary; let’s trust instead this passionate dear running her own little business of alternative ‘cures’ and assuring us it’s somehow not about the money’ is, too often, jumping away from the slightly scary to the genuinely dangerous.
As, normally, sure, the only real damage alt med does is to your bank account (tho’ that too can be considerable), as the ‘cures’ are mostly placebo. Take homeopathy, for instance: while it might distract you from taking a cure that might actually do something, otherwise, the only actual active damage the ‘preparations’ themselves could possibly do you would be if you took enough of ‘em at once to induce water intoxication.
And then there’s shit like this. Which, on balance, I wish were just placebo.
(/See also the original article at Science-based medicine.)
Not so much in the former case, especially, that I still don’t want to smack ‘em sometimes, mind. Please to read up on herd immunity, and why it’s not all about you, and mebbe read up a bit, too, on some of the symptoms and hazards of the rather miserable pathogens you’ve probably never even experienced firsthand, thanks to vaccination programs (and this, too, is probably part of the problem: when the programs work so well and people actually don’t realize what a bloody miserable deal things like whooping cough and polio can be, sure, they get complacent, tho’ I digress.)
In the latter case—those parents whose children have conditions for which treatment options are limited or of limited efficacy or for which there simply are no treatment options—and who then turn to various quacks who’ll sell ‘em a ‘cure’ anyway, my contempt is, I think, rather more focused on the cons, not the parents. Like the faith healers mentioned a few articles back, there’s something intensely revolting about that general form of scam and those who make money from it.
Anyway, still: the anxieties people have about this stuff, fine, I get that, a bit, I think. It’s a big, complicated world, and the biosciences are especially complicated. So there’s something naturally seductive, I’m sure, about folk selling various quack remedies they also tout as ‘natural’, especially…
Ah, as it’s just so much less scary, that ‘natural’ stuff, right? As opposed to images of cold, clean, clinical labs staffed by folk in white coats playing around in scary ways with DNA or some damned thing (the mandatory mad scientist B-movie cliché goes here: ‘You are meddling with things that ought not be meddled with!’), well, as opposed to this, you get these warm fuzzy images of a possibly grandmotherly woman who runs a health food store, bakes apple pies, cools ‘em on the windowsill, then injects those into your little darlings…
… well, she injects that or bleach. Either way…
Bleach, right? That’s not scary. Just a nice, friendly industrial-strength product you use in higher dilutions to make your clothes whiter, and which, if you spill even those concentrations on your skin, you’d better run to the fucking cold water tap and wash it off while you still have your skin on.
The mind boggles. Seriously. Word to the wise: take this lil’ example and keep it in mind. The point being: saying ‘ZOMG! Scary big science is scary; let’s trust instead this passionate dear running her own little business of alternative ‘cures’ and assuring us it’s somehow not about the money’ is, too often, jumping away from the slightly scary to the genuinely dangerous.
As, normally, sure, the only real damage alt med does is to your bank account (tho’ that too can be considerable), as the ‘cures’ are mostly placebo. Take homeopathy, for instance: while it might distract you from taking a cure that might actually do something, otherwise, the only actual active damage the ‘preparations’ themselves could possibly do you would be if you took enough of ‘em at once to induce water intoxication.
And then there’s shit like this. Which, on balance, I wish were just placebo.
(/See also the original article at Science-based medicine.)
