Bad medicine…
I’m old-fashioned when it comes to medicine. I use the good ol’ stuff that’s been here for ages and not tomorrow’s wonder drug. For one, I have seen too many scary scenarios in movies… read too many in books… and the news… The medicine companies are driven by investors – investors want money. If they can make more money releasing a drug prematurely – they will. They will weigh the chances of unplanned side-effects and the associated law-suits up against the possible gain – and decide from this.
It’s not that I don’t think scientists are brilliant – I just think that there are too many shrugs, when I ask my physician about my coughing for me to be totally comfortable that humans are capable of saying what is good and what is bad. Everytime I have been down there in the last 5 years – and that’s maybe been 3-4 times – he’ll say “Hmm… it’s probably the flu… uhm… come back if it turns worse…” There are so many variables when you apply a chemical to the human body that I for one think that science need a couple of more years to figure that one out.
But I trust the old advice – and then again… maybe I don’t. This evening I went with my fianc?e and one of our mutual friends to a small happening about how the city of Aalborg was in the 1500s centered around the witch-hunts and such. This didn’t shock me much – I’ve heard it all before, but then she started talking about medicine in the middle-ages – you had what is now the apothecary or a pharmacy…
The treatments that they used… well, even I can see that they are… uhm… disgusting is a good word. To cure an infected finger… you’d first try holding your finger inside a live cat’s ear for 15 minutes while keeping quiet (!) – and if that didn’t work, you’d take a live toad, make a small hole in the buttom of it – and stick your finger in it for a few days… If you had rashes, you’d use a dead, dried toad and then shred it over the rash, mix it with other choice ingredients and wrap a bandage around it and walk around with it for a few days… Entirely too many toads involved in medicine back then. Other choice ingredients they used were blood from women’s period – skin and meat from dead people… and I’ll stop now I promise…
And it’s amazing how many of these ‘treatments’ that have survived up in modern days. Now they are just called something different, wrapped in a shiny box and sold as ‘life-style’-medicine – which is another term for ‘stuff that might work’. I’m not saying that they are all wrong, but the ratio between actually proven healing herbs and normal cooking herbs isn’t looking good…
And the funny thing is – even if people are told the truth about this with medical facts and so on – they don’t stop using it. They will keep believing the stuff works – because they might have heard about a friends mother’s aunt that was helped with this wonder-drug. But even more amazing is that it is probably true – there will probably be some patient that was cured while taking this drug. Of course it might not be due to the drug… but that’s another story.
We’re back at all the variables – every statistic will tell you that not everyone is cured using this or that drug. It will always be ‘a better chance’ or something similar – companies and manufacterers have long ago learned that nothing is 100% in medicine – and promising 100% is a sure way to get a whole lot of law-suits.
When you introduce a new chemical into the human body – scientists will at best have a basic understanding of how this chemical will affect a certain part of the body – but they have no idea what happens when it is mixed with different diets, other chemicals, smoking, the amount of exercise, other illnesses, previous treatments… there are so many different outcomes that it’s impossible to try out in a laboratory.
Hmm… I’ll have to travel to my parents – they have a small water hole with a lot of toads… I’ll forage for the next time, I become ill…