Re: Nature versus Medicine - which is safer and more effective?

You wrote,

> Herbs are a completely unregulated multi billion dollar industry with no oversight whatsoever.

Considering that that herbal remedies are under a severe attack from the lawmakers, it is rather thick of you to state that they are not regulated.

> The evidence for the efficacy or safety of most herbs is unknown,

May be to you. Have not we been through this in the time of inquisition of middle ages, when those who knew were being accused of witchcraft and burned at stake along with their knowledge?

> the evidence that does exist for most of them is of poor quality.

How else? The grassroots knowledge collected over millenia has always been suppressed by your kind.

> It really doesn't matter if people have believed something for thousands of years,

Oh, belief? Now tell me, does curare work because people believe it works? Does chamomile tea work because people believe it works? Does destroying angel work [as poison] because people believe it works? Does mumie work because some befuddled Russians believe it works?

> they believed the Earth was flat as well until science showed otherwise.

Oh, the flat earth, huh? Was not it Ptolemy, the great scientist and mathematician, and the orthodox science of the day who taught the ignorant folks that such was the case?

> People believe in all sorts of things for no rational reasons (witchcraft, bigfoot, alien abduction, Atlantis, psychic powers etc)

This is a meal, but for an example: The fact that most people are musically deaf does not constitute the fact that music does not exist. Does it constitute a fact that music has no rational basis? [This entails psychic powers and witchcraft only, as far as I am able to tell.]

> Adverse effects from herbs are under-reported by the AM community, actually not reported at all.

Which only shows the despicable attitude of the governments to help out with whatever may be and is beneficial to regular Joe Blows. It also says nothing to the effect of effectiveness of natural remedies.

> It is only mainstream science that periodically picks up case reports of adverse outcomes.

> Which case reports would stand no proper scientific scrutiny. Case studies are not exactly a good procedure in pushing even the orthodox drugs and procedures.

> However, many more are documented in the popular press, from which this database is drawn.

I would like to see what FDA would have to say to lets say Baxter supplying information of proof on their product[s] drawn from the "popular press".

> It is very likely that considering AM is used far less in absolute numbers than real medicine, the percentage of adverse outcomes is at least equivalent to that of medicine.

Your groundless opinion means nothing. AM is used to some degree by just about every single person in this world, beginning with all kinds of teas. As it stands, even just eating organic foods can nowadays be considered AM, with all the garbage we are fed by the industry.

> If a substance has an effect, as we know medicine does, and you claim herbs do...then it also has side effects.

Huh? Hammer is a dull object which can be effectively used to kill a person. Feather is a dull object, therefore it can also be effectively used to kill a person.

> We won't know for sure unless you people actually start keeping track. Is that going to be happening any time soon?

Considering how many people in both, AM as well as ortho M have kept the track only to be derailed and the records destroyed, one for each W.Reich, W.F.Koch, you must be grossly uninformed about the legal record keeping. When are you people going to stop interfering with competition using wrongful laws as a tool? Is it going to take a revolution to bring you down?

> It is a fallacy to claim that just because something is natural it is better or safer.

And who exactly claims that? Nature has created poisons the man has as yet to match artificially.

> Plants evolved bioactive chemicals for their own unique needs, and it is only an accident of nature that a very few of them happen to have medicinal benefits in humans.

What exactly do you mean by very few? Any guestimate? There are so many that you would need a lifetime to study up a small fraction of it.

> Most of them are only partly helpful to humans in their natural state and need modification to make them safer and more effective (ASA, Digoxin, coumadin, tamoxifen)

So? Can you name one pharmaceutical, which actually takes into the account the whole of any herb working synergeticaly in unison? Has it ever occured to you that this lack of efficiency along with the herbs other chemicals the pharma takes out may actually serve to avoid side effects?

Look at hemp. All you people were able to do is to isolate some of its beneficial chemicals and use them wrongly and insufficiently while a maintenance fellow Rick Simpson has put a fast one on you? The same is most likely the case with oleander and who knows what else, even the simple dietary effect of Johanna Budwig's cottage cheese and linseed oil.

Medicine is overwhelmingly more successful than "nature".

> Yeah, in killing people. If it were not for nature and its herbs pharma is exploiting for intelligence, Rockefellers would still be peddling crude oil as a cure all.

> It is always about the risk vs benefit, and medicine always comes out on positive side of that equation.

Tell that to the millions of hapless people who have trusted their faith in mainstream medicine which has failed them. But you would have to die first, would not you?

> Nature is mostly trying to kill us.

Really? If it were not for the nature, you would not live and spread your poisonous saliva here.

Ciao, Slavek.