Oh, herbal remedies. Big yes to people needing to be aware that, hello, they're drugs. And, incidentally, they often have contaminants (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/health/policy/26herbal.html), thanks to the fact that they have no governmental oversight or FDA control! But even disregarding the contaminant issue, people need to be aware that just because something is herbal or "natural" (a word I am seriously coming to dread when it comes to just about everything because of how horribly it gets misused) it can still hurt you. There's this bizarre idea that if things are herbal, of course they can't actually do damage, which is just absurd. Hello, a lot of plants are poisonous? And any medication, made of anything, if it actually does something, can hurt you if you take the wrong kind or too much.
...and I don't even want to think about that person giving people medicine to their cat, because otherwise I'll have to curl up in a ball and cry for that poor kitty.
As for acupuncture... personally, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about the efficacy of it floating around. Everything I've read indicates that its major effectiveness is more or less as a placebo - if people believe it works, it works. That's not efficacy, that's a placebo effect. I recognize there's some controversy there, but every study I've heard that supported actual efficacy of acupuncture ended up being too small to be statistically significant. But that's a whole can of worms, right there, so... whatever. I think we can all agree it's no good for telling whether somebody's had sex. :P
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Date: 2010-05-27 09:20 pm (UTC)...and I don't even want to think about that person giving people medicine to their cat, because otherwise I'll have to curl up in a ball and cry for that poor kitty.
As for acupuncture... personally, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about the efficacy of it floating around. Everything I've read indicates that its major effectiveness is more or less as a placebo - if people believe it works, it works. That's not efficacy, that's a placebo effect. I recognize there's some controversy there, but every study I've heard that supported actual efficacy of acupuncture ended up being too small to be statistically significant. But that's a whole can of worms, right there, so... whatever. I think we can all agree it's no good for telling whether somebody's had sex. :P