I meant supplements in a broad sense, to include stuff like herbal remedies.
No doubt that the stuff that’s commercialized and in overpriced pill form is just making a handful of people rich using the placebo effect. But a lot of the medications we have were developed from what indigenous peoples were using for centuries if not millennia.
It’s reductionist and borderline capitalist-brained to suggest that non-Western cultures did not have any effective way of treating and preventing illness.
that “developed from” is doing a lot of work. the important reason to have an aspirin tablet instead of brewing some willow bark is dosage control.
“traditional” or whatever medicine that works just became regular medicine. other than stuff that has like a weed panic around it the stuff that’s leftover is what didn’t stand up to scrutiny or couldn’t be cultivated
Certainly. Conventional (pharmaceutical- and surgery-centric) medicine won the race to being viable, and what came with it was the ability to refine things that came from different traditions.
It still suffers from problems of overdiagnosis, iatrogenic and hospital-borne illness, the antibiotic-resistance time bomb, now the reproducibility crisis, and being particularly suited for being turned into a tool of capital and of social stratification. We were just talking about this a few days ago.
I wouldn’t scrap it, but there are a lot of reforms that could be made to it.
I meant supplements in a broad sense, to include stuff like herbal remedies.
No doubt that the stuff that’s commercialized and in overpriced pill form is just making a handful of people rich using the placebo effect. But a lot of the medications we have were developed from what indigenous peoples were using for centuries if not millennia.
It’s reductionist and borderline capitalist-brained to suggest that non-Western cultures did not have any effective way of treating and preventing illness.
that “developed from” is doing a lot of work. the important reason to have an aspirin tablet instead of brewing some willow bark is dosage control.
“traditional” or whatever medicine that works just became regular medicine. other than stuff that has like a weed panic around it the stuff that’s leftover is what didn’t stand up to scrutiny or couldn’t be cultivated
Certainly. Conventional (pharmaceutical- and surgery-centric) medicine won the race to being viable, and what came with it was the ability to refine things that came from different traditions.
It still suffers from problems of overdiagnosis, iatrogenic and hospital-borne illness, the antibiotic-resistance time bomb, now the reproducibility crisis, and being particularly suited for being turned into a tool of capital and of social stratification. We were just talking about this a few days ago.
I wouldn’t scrap it, but there are a lot of reforms that could be made to it.