I ran across this article today which might interest some LQ members:
http://naturalsociety.com/4-natural-...nt-know-about/

" scam " treatments
( supplements, complementary and alternative ? medicine? == S.C.A.M. )

and it is one


please see the real science in medicine
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

My grandfather would say that God put all the things we need on this earth. Not sure how true it is but there are plants that can make our lives better. Maybe the best example is aspirin. Some cancer treatments based on trees. I think under careful tests one may find those useful.

I was using a "natural" product for what I forget but it had some side effects.

It is still easy to loose sight of the fact that some of these can be dangerous.

Be very skeptical of the patter you hear when the Medicine show rolls into town. Sometimes the snake oil is nothing but snake oil, but without either the snake or the oil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/sc...they-seem.html

I do believe many herbs have healing and medicinal properties. Some may even be better than allopathic drugs for certain conditions. Many allopathic drugs are derived from herbs after all. However, I don't generally trust commercial herbal extracts -- I think it's better to buy the herb and prepare it or buy preparations directly from a reliable homeopathic healer/pharmacy.

I know a jimsom weed flower will numb pain from personal experience (not injested, applied topically as a salve).
If it don't kill you first.

I've had a Bruja treat me after a scooter injury with the old Indian ways.

Potent and dangerous stuff. Like all the other plants,animals, and insects in a desert environment.

one of the issues with all this ANTI scientific medical "natural" over the counter nonsense
is that about 1/3 DO NOT have any of the listed ingredient actually IN THEM .

they are ALL filler
rice
lawn mower grass clippings
WHEAT flour
( and not listed -- if you ARE A CELIAC patient -- you are in BIG TROUBLE )

Two universal cure all's:

Don't join the ranks of the two now-dead people who made two cups of comfrey tea with foxglove (digitalis). The plants are very similar in appearance.

Yes, many natural substances are effective for pain management as well as other purposes ... but seek professional help. Especially when you are seeking a pain-relieving effect, "remember, you won't get a second chance if you screw up."

My grandmothers soups and teas cured all of us faster and safer than " doctor's pills "!! Many years later she was in the hospital in Boston and my relatives thought she might be near death so I flew up from Atlanta to visit her!! After visiting her I went to a friends house and used her juicer to make a pickle jar full of beet, carrot, and cucumber juice and I brought it to my grandmother and told her not to eat any cooked foods and drink the juice as quickly as she could. The next day my grandmother sat on the toilet and shed all of the junk clogging up her body!! The day after that she called my cousin to pick her up and bring her home!! The hospital staff was dumbfounded and thought I was so kind of " merlin " capable of magic!!

I agree that supplements like the ones posted are not USA FDA regulated and therefore the consumer has no idea what they really contain. www.consumerlab.com costs money to join but it is the site to go to to find out.

On the other hand I see nothing wrong with alternative medicine. Its been used for thousands of years (Traditional Chinese Medicine) and many of our "real" medicines were derived from plants like Aspirin, Menthol, Morphine, Tamoxifen etc.

I don't think that the FDA does a damn thing anymore to provide "pure food and drugs." And I do think that alternative medical treatments are very often effective. I work with an M.D. who studies these things quite extensively, as do I.

My specific caution is that pain treatment necessarily involves "powerful narcotic effects," and that these, therefore, are very dangerous things to "experiment with." If you are in chronic pain, you do not have to become an addicted zombie. But you do need to know that you are dealing with fire.

It may sound odd for me to say, "consider marijuana." There are certain types of pain that cannabis is capable of blocking, without you "getting high." No one really knows whether the active ingredient is THC or not, and so far no company has been able to synthesize whatever-it-is. (In other words, isolates administered in "pill" form might or might not be effective, where the plant itself is. Also, in some cases the plant is not smoked, but chewed or applied as a poultice.) Ask your doctor about it. It's a cutting-edge of pain care research right now. I have a friend for which it is "startlingly effective."

Because we have to make so many decisions, often that affect our own or others well-being if not lives, we all prefer things be clear and simple. On the subject of this thread most of the posts so far are quite polarized especially on he pro modern establishment side, calling herbs, complementary and alternative medicine "scam" and "non scientific". Some on the other side have a deep distrust of modern medicine. Both camps are guilty of over simplification, are fully capable of bad decisions, because this whole subject of health and treatment is far from clear and simple.

There are scams on both sides. There are misinformed on both sides and prejudice, for many reasons including mysticism and money, are rampant. All of modern medicine originally grew from empirical study (which is why Doctoring is still called a "practice" and not a "science") and that includes herbs and culturally biased practices. Much of that empirical study came from gladiators, war and factory accidents - catastrophic physical damage. You can bet if you get shot or are in a car crash your odds are exceedingly good for survival because such damage is so obvious and the body of knowledge so voluminous. In the more fundamental, somewhat hidden areas, and especially where individual differences matter more (the cause and cure of a broken arm is the sane on all of us while headaches, for example, are not) ar far less known. Even pain itself is not well understood. How our brains sort raw sensation into the various specifics - hot, cold, pleasant, painful - even consciousness itself are at this point largely guesswork.

Obviously one could, and many do, write a whole series of books on this subject but this is just a sub-forum and not the place. I will just urge everyone here to be proactive with health, to try to rise above programming and prejudice, and find out for yourself what works for you. Your very life could depend upon it.

An interesting experience for those who enjoy videos and controversy

The Human Experiment

Doctored

Note - If you choose to watch Doctored note that the field of Chiropractic is not free from scams, quacks and incompetents anymore than modern medicine doctors and hospitals are but there is good information within to digest.

I didn't include any pro modern medicine documentaries because that is entirely pervasive in modern societies.

I did not mention it but I studied yoga under Bo-In-Lee and macrobiotics under Michio Kushi in Boston ( I was dragged there by a very wise woman of course ) I always advise people to get books like " How to see your health by Michio Kushi " which makes oriental diagnosis simple and clear to understand. I run into clerks at the stores from time to time suffering from headaches and/or back pain and I can plainly see that they are really suffering. Usually they have a hard lumps in one or both hands between the thumb and first finger which indicates that their intestines are clogged up. Massaging the lump eventually stimulates the intestines to move the blockage along and the pain abates. Pain is an indication that something inside of you is wrong; relieving the pain does not cure the cause of the pain!!

Actually, one of my long-time clients was Jones Medical, which was later bought by TwinLab. I can assure you that the manufacturing processes, content and labeling of these products is tightly regulated, including all sources from whence the ingredients come. One of the core requirements of the system that I built for them was that it had to help facilitate Federal audits ... of everything that went into any lot-number, the particulars of all QA testing that was performed, and so-on down the line. It was a bewildering array of records to keep track of, and therefore, a very fun program to do.

- - - - -

The American strategy for medicine is, first of all, geared around the idea that everything is a profitable business. Any discovery must be turned into a patent. The patents cost millions of dollars to get, and therefore must be coaxed into producing a return on investment. The patent is chiefly for an "isolate" of whatever (usually-)natural product is used, or, better (for them ...) yet, a "synthetic replacement." It must also be something that an insurance company can be persuaded that it can profitably pay for ... or that will reduce its business costs.

To these companies, by the way, you (or your loved one) are "a unit." That's what they call you, behind your back. Your medical condition has an associated "actuarial profile." For example, if you get cancer, that will be worth ~$80,000 in profit to whatever medical facility "treats" you, before you (of course) die. If your particular cancer turns out to be more difficult, you will die quicker. ("Oops...") To get a troublesome "unit" off the rolls. (So that your grieving family can pay about $25,000 to bury you.)

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However, there are groups of physicians and scientists who are actively working to promote medical research that "thinks outside the box" in the United States. For example, the Life Extension Foundation is one of them: (Their plethora of scientific literature, and their monthly magazine, is absolutely engaging reading. This is not quackery: this is medical science. My [M.D.] physician first called my attention to it, decades ago. (He refers to himself as "a health nerd," and I guess I've become one, too.)

This is not "grandma's potions," and yet it does recognize that pragmatic medical knowledge does not come in a jar with Letters Patent. For instance, one of the "folk remedies" listed in The Foxfire Book is: "eat moldy bread." The Appalachian mountain people did not know about penicillin per se, and yet they most-certainly did, because they were consuming it. I keep a jar of grated cheese in the fridge with a healthy blue-green penicillium colony growing on it, and I also eat roquefort cheese.

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Nutritional supplements are being indiscriminately sold as the highly-profitable products that they are (especially in an America where access to doctors and hospital care is rapidly becoming unobtainable by the common man ... and please don't lecture me about the ACA ...), but there is "a truth to it" beneath the hype. One of the most interesting authors is Dr. James F. Balch, DVM, MD ... a "Kentucky horse doctor" (ka-ching!) who went on to get an MD degree, and who discovered that veterinarians receive several courses on nutrition whereas, at the time, human MD's took only one. He observed that what a vet would call "cribbing" (an improperly-nourished horse is literally eating the wood of his stall ...) is what the snack-food industry calls "the munchies." Yes, Virginia, that soft-drink that you consume by the quart each day, laden with phosphoric acid, is stripping minerals from your body, and causing you to be thirsty. ("Time for another soda...")

The trouble here is that people don't get, and don't seek, information. They want a cure in a bottle, "no thought required." Therefore: "It probably does them no harm, but it does them no good, either."

- - - - -

Still ... circling back to the notion of "natural herbs for pain," this (to me) is diving straight into the realm of "self-diagnosis and self-treatment" in a realm that is "intrinsically dangerous." The things that (ordinarily) must be done "to relieve pain" are dangerously related to things that can kill you. You don't get a second chance to be ignorant about such things. Be careful. Be wise. Get informed.