555 bottles of Noni Juice ought to do "something'!!!

This parody is good for what ails you.

Good stuff

Inspired by this perhaps?
http://www.motleyhealth.com/articles/2010/01/mass-homeopathic-overdose-planned-for-january-30th-2010.html

Thanks all :-)

Dr Pepper - it wasn't, but it should have been: I'd love to hear all the 10:23 protesters singing it, but the chorus'd need changing: I'm not sure the sarcasm would be obvious, and people might get the wrong idea.

he he

Ahhhh.... I feel better already! (But I've got a little stitch in my side...) ;)

Technically excellent as always, Phil, but the sarcasm doesn't register well here. I made a kidney stone disappear completely with just a couple of totally-natural substances found in the health food store. Doctor (M. D.) refused to believe it, despite before and after X-rays. So I quit going to that doctor.

Had a couple more "miracle" cures, but for the sake of privacy (and boring readers), won't bother. Seen a few more in others. Not homeopathy, but Alt-Med in general. Pharmaceutical co. fraud, (esp. in testing of new drugs) deception, marketing, (bribing doctors to prescribe their drugs) and ripoffs need parody too. Maybe you'll do that one day.

I'd vote this 555, but according to conventional medicine, I've been dead for a dozen years. Oh, heck, take the Fives posthumously for a well-executed, funny write, even if I disagree.

TT - there's a huge difference between "natural substances" (which may or may not have a working active ingredient) and a homoeopathic dilution which contains not even a single molecule of any active ingredient at all, nor any proof whatsoever that it actually works... just a load of waffle from its practitioners who, every time they try to explain how it works simply show that they have no understanding at all about physical, chemical or biological science.

don't know why, but even missing my meds while reading this... i just felt....better... well done Phil

All natural alternative humor! ;D

Phil, I'm *mostly* with you on homeopathy (more below), but you also hit on acupuncture (President Nixon had an appendectomy in China with only acupuncture for anaesthesia -- with a lot of Western journalists watching, to back it up), chiropractic (studies have shown that for chronic back pain, chiropractic is about as likely to provide relief as "conventional" surgery, without the risks and at much less expense), Reiki, hypnosis, meditation (which has been shown to lower blood pressure, without the side effects of "ethical" -- what a misused word !-- pharmaceuticals), and a whole verse:

I believe in Alt-Med, Fred
I believe in Alt-Med
Normal med leaves you dead, Fred
I believe in Alt-Med

Yep, that's I. Normal med would have left me dead. And would also have required surgery for yet another condition that was cured by alt-med without surgery. ... Do you want to hear about the 30-yr-old mother with terminal breast cancer, barely conscious, who was given a few days to live, and whom I saw happily wheeling around in a wheelchair several weeks later, eating and recovering? ... didn't think so.

Perhaps that well-known skepticism toward establishment religions could be turned toward establishment medicine? It *could* be enlightening.. Just a thought.

Oh, yeah, the fooTnoTe mentioned in the first line: Allergic rhinitis ("hay fever" -- is that term used in the UK?) is treated conventionally by highly-diluted injections of the very things to which you are allergic. The dilutions are gradually reduced over a couple of years of weekly injections. That worked once, for moi -- but when the condition returned some years later, a few drops of a homeopathic remedy provided much more immediate relief, and avoids the needle stabs. Cheers.

Great parody – and I had fun singing along to myself. However, since I've seen the power of Homeopathy and Reiki for myself (to parody another quote: 'validity is in the eye of the beholder') I just want to remind us that logic, and all the arguments that are suspended from it, are valid only within a given context. The logic that works with ref. to Newtonian physics is often stood on its head in the field of quantum physics. And we get oodles of nonsense when the 'logic' of quanta and chaos is used to scoff at Sir Isaac. When, as has been argued ad nauseam, time and space are nothing but a figment of our creative imaginations, then Rolf Harris, you, me and the Dodo are nowhere separate from the headache I've caused myself by thinking too much about all this. Sadly – or happily! - homeopathy and Reiki shouldn't work but they do. Just don't ask me why or how. Now, where did I put my Dodo drops for this headache...

TT - the stats don't lie: normal medicine saves a historically unprecedented number of lives, repeatably, every year. Alternative medicine (unfortunately, there's a huge range of variation from the possible to the out-and-out quackery that shelters under that heading) by and large doesn't.

Re chiropractic - if they'd kept their claims to treating back pain, they wouldn't have been mentioned in this song.

Do I want to hear about individual cases? No, because the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence" - if it worked, reliably, then the results would speak for themselves. But they don't.

Ironically enough, "Don't Stop Believin'" is playing in the background as I type this..

Don - homeopathy and Reiki shouldn't work.. and when subjected to objective inspection, they don't.

There was a time when physicists and aerodynamicists insisted that bumblebees couldn't fly -- yet they do. And when science insisted that the atom was the smallest unit of matter.

I'm not saying all conventional medicine is false, but you're saying *all* Alt-med is false. Categorical statements like this are (logically) risky.

I'm aware that anecdotes are not evidence, but for some unfathomable reason, drug companies and conventional physicians refuse to subject proposed alternative therapies to controlled, double-blind studies -- go figure! So anecdotes are all that is left, other than the study about back pain. Of course there will be deliberate exclusion, to protect the established interests.

Of course I'm aware that there's a ton of quackery in alt-med. There's some in conventional med, too, a lot of misdiagnoses; 10,000 people killed in the US each year by prescription mistakes, 7,000 by the NSAID class of "approved medications taken deliberately.... etc.

In extreme cases, i. e. the "terminal" breast cancer case, one must keep in mind that such therapies are generally tried *only after* the patient has been diagnosed as terminal, and told by Con-Med to go home and die. So *any* success is meaningful, since the rate of "spontaneous remission" from such Con-Med terminal diagnoses is minuscule.

Nothing works "reliably", including the computers we're using. Con-med still can't cure the common cold, but I've licked it many times in a day or two with a combo of assorted homebrews, vs. 1-2 weeks average for most people. They finally proved by clinical trial that Zicam™ shortens the duration of a cold, but it's just zinc, which I'd been taking as part of the above cold remedy for years.

The side effects of Con-Med prescriptions are notorious. Listen to the TV ads (are the disclosure laws as strict in the UK?) Death is a common one, as is liver disease, stroke, etc.... The first rule of medicine was supposed to be "primum non nocerre", but that's been tossed aside.

If Con-Med worked reliably, Alt-med wouldn't exist. There could be places where either or both, in combo, are appropriate. That's all I'm saying. This song doesn't seem to allow for that possibility.

I'll skip some other genuine *miracles* (impossible by "approved" treatments) that I *personally* have experienced, partly for my own privacy and partly because it doesn't seem that you're interested. It can be tough to wade through the spurious claims to get to the real, but please keep a somewhat more open mind to alt, and a somewhat more skeptical one to con. (Gross overuse of hysterectomy; gross overdiagnoses of ADD to a kid who's just bored with a boring school, but given otherwise-illegal stimulants in the amphetamine class, at the age of six, etc.)

And a very dear friend of a dear friend visited multiple con-doctors for persistent headaches. She was told "it's all in your head" (ha ha) and given f***ing ANTIDEPRESSANTS. By the time they finally looked and found the brain tumor, it was too late.

Just asking for the same degree of openness and skepticism to each. Cheers.

TT - What you have with conventional medicine is that the overwhelming majority works, backed up with statistics and reliable research... and some bits round the edges that don't work/have nasty side-effects/are illegitimately-sold money-raisers for large pharmaceutical companies; alt-med by and large doesn't work, with some bits round the edges that do help, more by luck than judgment - bearing in mind that if an alt-med technique is proven to work, it's not alt any more.

If conventional medicine is as bad as you say over there, it sounds like individual doctors trying to up their own personal incomes (/cover their arses) by prescribing more/operating more - maybe someone in government over there ought to suggest reforming the system. (We don't get TV ads for medication over here, apart from cough medicine/painkillers, that sort of thing)

Homoeopathy doesn't even have that "bits round the edge" effect - there is *literally* nothing in it - no research benefits, no active ingredients.. the last Cochrane review found an inverse correlation between how good the research methodology was and how positive the outcome was reported.

Have a look at Ben Goldacre's site: badscience.net - he goes after bad science from drug companies, governments and the media as well as alt-med, homoeopathy and the like (I'd also *very* strongly recommend his "Bad Science" book - not because I think you need eyes opening in that way, but because I recommend it to anyone who seems remotely interested in the subject)