Complementary and Asinine Medicine

I try to keep an open mind, I really do. That’s why I watch movies I don’t agree with and angrily scrawl curse words in the margins of books I don’t agree with. Hell, I’ll even associate with some people who a sane culture would ban from procreating (I kid). Me taking Granny P’s CAM course is a whole new level of this same line of reasoning. I subscribe to the novel house of thought that says “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” is described as ‘complementary’ and ‘alternative’ because it’s too shitty to be regular old Medicine. I mean, there’s the obvious few things that have benefits known to you, I, and everyone that doesn’t resemble Howard Dean – acupuncture, glucosamine/chondrointin, and a few others. But beyond the few that mainly aren’t studied because there isn’t enough green (read as: dollar dollar bill, y’all) to dictate researching, is there something to CAM? My mindset in the past has been to just say “fuck it” and avoid wading through conflicting literature to arrive at a therapy that’s marginally beneficial.


My natural aversion to CAM mostly arises from bullshit claims like these (link) about how something as simple as a grapefruit can apparently lower cholesterol, fight diabetes (what?), reduce fever (huh?), and stave off breast/stomach/pancreatic cancer (oh fuck you). Why the shit do we even have drugs if panacea apparently is found in grapefruits?

And the heir apparent to the pixie dust throne in all of this is homeopathic medicine – from the Greek literally meaning “treatment of diseases of the “Homey”. Homeopathy (I avoid even attaching this shoddy term to ‘medicine’ when possible) is built upon such principles as “There’s no such thing as multiple disease states” and “the antidote to disease is the disease-causing agent in smaller amounts”. Sometimes the former line of reasoning may appear to make sense – i.e. a patient is morbidly obese and has diabetes (hint: the common denominator is a Twinkie). However, once you graduate from the Simple Jack School of Medicine and see an actual fucking patient, this child-like reasoning quickly falls apart. The other tenet doesn’t stand up to…well, common sense, really. Example: we don’t treat snake bites with copperheads and cancer with asbestos – wisdom like this is why you keep reading the blog, don’t lie.

The final tenet of homeopathy is diluting the shit out of said disease-causing agent with water or alcohol (my personal preference is vodka) before administering it. Maybe “diluting the shit out of” didn’t impact upon you the degree to which homeopathy advocates diluting: the father of homeopathy advocated diluting things to the 10^-60th power (or 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 for those of you keeping score at home). Wikipedia says “10^34 GALLONS of remedy would have to be consumed in order to consume a single MOLECULE of the original substance,” and that this tenet is “unsupported by the collective weight of modern scientific research…[it] is counter to the laws of chemistry and physics.”

Consuming extraneous amounts of BS in order to obtain a single iota of something useful? Sounds like pharmacy school already.

Awesome:
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