Things that annoy me, #728: The "holistic medicine" fruitloops.

[TheWraith]

This is not intended as an attack on anybody who believes in a little bit of natural medicine. It is instead directed solely at the people who've completely lost their mind on the subject of medicine, as exemplified by a certain DUer who recently posted here.

This person posted a series of email chain letters, purporting them to have the official sanction of Johns Hopkins University, ranting authoritatively about how chemotherapy killed people, the only thing that caused cancer was a bad diet, milk causes mucus which feeds cancer, etcetera, etcetera. It didn't even rise to the level of pseudo-science: it was basically leechcraft and 16th century superstition.

Obviously, while they had a few cheerleaders in the thread, the substance of the person's posts was pretty quickly debunked, including with links to Snopes and Johns Hopkins. The former was questioned by the OP, demanding to know how Snopes was an authority on the subject, and the latter was ignored. Finally, the mods locked the thing on the grounds of it being basically trash.

When I sent this person a PM after their thread got locked asking them to please have more sense in the future and fact check their information, because that kind of myth does get people killed, they sent back a truly delusional response about how my "lies about the Gods in medicine" were killing "millions of people every year," and "Most people only find out the truth once a significant other in their life is killed by doctors and their poison."

Okay, it's a free country, and you have the right to believe that running naked under the full moon cures warts if you want, in defiance of all scientific knowledge and basic human reasoning. But if you're going to speak publicly about something so foolish, don't be surprised when you get mocked and derided as a fool. I wonder whether this person is just deluded, or if this is their way of working out grief, by blaming all scientific medicine. Either way, it frustrates and angers me when people who clearly have no understanding whatsoever of science or medicine attribute all western knowledge to a great big conspiracy to kill people.

[LaStrega]

1. I work with just such a fruitloop ...

Last year her 9-year-old son contracted strep and she would not take him to the doctor. Instead she had him taking something which she called "rabbit pills" (I have no idea what they actually were.) Poor kid had strep for just this side of three weeks. Sometimes you should take antibiotics.

I'm just sayin'.

[ConcernedCanuk]

2. "running naked under the full moon cures warts"? - gee I never knew that

.
.
.

I just did it for fun!

and I got no warts.

[xchrom]

3. recommend. -- you can't imagine how many friends

and family members i have who owe their lives to ''big pharma'', doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc.

and how many others have crossed into death's dateless night because we didn't or don't have the medicine needed.

no, it hasn't all been perfect -- but it would have all been so much worse even fifty or thirty years ago.

[MADem]

4. There are people who "need help" and have computers.

Some of them end up here. Every so often we see one of those far-out assertions. It's rather sad, in'nit?

If we had really decent health care for all across this great land of ours, perhaps that person would have gotten some decent care by now, and those paranoid delusions would be tamped down.

[Berry Cool]

5. Understood.

There are ways in which Big Pharma is evil that puts money and profit above people, and there are ways in which many of us, undeniably, would not be alive today without Big Pharma. It's a double-edged sword. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge that is just being a fool.

I'm all in favor of trying to find ways to prevent disease rather than even having them occur in the first place, but the fact remains, if you find out that you have a serious disease, chances are that ignoring all conventional forms of treatment will only make things worse.

[SidDithers]

6. K&R...

I'm just sorry that thread got locked. 'Cause I had LOTS more to say to that idiot.

Sid

[maddezmom]

7. locking

Please don't start a thread to callout another member of DU.