Re: [DIYbio] Re: Political work: DIYbio vs. "alternative 'medicine'"

Dennis Oleksyuk <mail@dennis-o.com> writes:

> To proponents of science based medicine. Try to stop yourself and just
> ignore people who are proactively pushing non-medicine, either directly or
> under pretext of being 'open minded'. Your time is better spent spreading
> scientific knowledge to people who are not active promoters of
> non-medicine. Once you convert someone to the scientific way of thinking
> they very rarely come back. You can count that as a solid win against
> ignorance.
>
> Those who are pushing non-medicine usually have too much invested into the
> argument to give it up. They either make public claims, which makes it
> really hard to backtrack and don't look bad. Or their livelihood literally
> depends on it because that is how they make their income.
>
> Also take a look at this article/podcast. It says the same thing but in
> much better way. I relisten and reread it time to time to remind myself to
> resist the urges to fight the anti-science claims.
> https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4167
>

I'm just throwing some thinking about what I've read in the previous
messages, this is not just an answer to you Dennis.


Just to state another opinion than this pure black-vs-white description
of the last messages of this thread, what I've seen also is people (like
me) that just say:

- don't throw non scientific-medicine as there are stuff to be studied
scientifically here. Be it in term of biology, medicine, sociology,
psychology… And all of these fields of research can use what you are
calling non-medicine as a subject of study.

To which I also add:

- these are practices which are the only way for a huge part of the
world population to have access to things that may potentially cure
them. It may not be ideal, maybe we just don't have our word to say on
that, depends with school of thought your are from. It doesn't mean
neither that because it is working in a particular place and a
particular time in the world it will be applicable anywhere else, just
because what may cure, what is the illness and what is the
human-relationship are completely different here and there.

And this is the reason why as scientists we have to study these things
as they are part of the humanity and its practices.

If you are more from the potential return on investment (which is
leading the thinking of many that are not doing scientific research but
technological research), there are things that are clearly working
coming from traditional medicine and/or practices such as Quinine,
Cocaine, Morphine, Δ9-THC, Aspirin/Salycilic acid, Capsaicin (there are
more less known examples if you are interested).

And just to avoid the sterile pseudo-debate with people that confuse
pseudo-medicine and natural products, 49% of anti-cancer drugs from 1940 to
2014 are derived from natural products, on all drugs approved between
1981 and 2014, 25% are coming almost directly from natural products and
you can add 10% to that number if you consider pharmacophores coming
from natural products (source DOI: 10.1021/acs.jnatprod.5b01055, likely
not OpenAccess but I may share it with people interested, just contact
me privately).

Now we also have to think about the targets for drugs, how were these
targets discovered? I don't have exact numbers here, but natural
products still likely played a huge role in here and still do, just
because they are present in virtually all screening sets which are not
fragments or too specialized. And also because some organisms use what
they can produce to protect themselves from other organisms, (cf. the
theory of Firn and Jones if you are interested in this).

There is a whole world hidden behind the magic-natural-pill-bullshit,
one just have to filter the non-sense, the sensational and the business
sharks, and this is not an easy work.

By the way this podcast was really interesting, and I agree, you cannot
argue with pseudo-scientists, but you cannot argue neither with
pseudo-skeptics that think that rejecting everything is the way to do
science, this is not what skepticism is about. This is not about saying
no te everything, it is about subjecting everything to systematic
investigation. So saying "we shouldn't investigate because I think it is
crap" is as dumb as "You cannot investigate because it uses the quantum
magnetic field of crystals dipped in garlic juice that was left for
fermenting during 13 moons, and your instruments will not be able to
measure that anyway".

Stuff like homeopathy have been studied, nothing positive ever showed-up
(or if it did, feel free to send me the references), so we can say that
it is highly likely (don't forget falsifiability here) that it doesn't
do anything more than what a placebo does.

But you cannot say "let's not study this or that because it is folk
practice", because if you didn't subject it to scientific investigation
(whichever the aspect of it you want to study), you just know… nothing…

--
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups DIYbio group. To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en
Learn more at www.diybio.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/diybio.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/8760vtnqte.fsf%40lenny.i-did-not-set--mail-host-address--so-tickle-me.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.