"Capitalism charging a fortune to cure you? With stuff that has scary side effects?"
"Have no fear! Now you can buy a bunch of shit that doesn't work, from us! We're also unregulated as fuck so who knows if this stuff messes up your kidneys."
The worst thing, and anyone who had parents who fell for these scams growing up will know this, is parents who will try to 'cure' their neurodivergent kids with rat butt herb or whatever. Have fun spending your formative years incorrectly medicated!
Sure, yes I know there are natural medicines that work for certain things. But the industry as a whole is so gross and predatory. Every so often they'll 'discover' some ancient remedy so they have something new to market. Selling crystals and sage to very ill people who need real treatment. Exploiting sick people who are desperate for a cure is low as hell and I'm surprised (but not surprised) that they can just sell things that do not do the thing they say they do.
natural medicines that work are just medicine. Usually crude extracts or raw biological material is disfavoured due to potential for side effects, difficulty dosing, or allergy potential.
Sometimes stuff just isn't investigated but mostly when that happens it's because there is already a pretty effective treatment
edit: to be clear I think it's really cool when people do use less industrialised forms of medicine to meet unmet needs and I think the structure in which medicine is often practiced is arse and harmful. Just don't reject science, which is cool and awesome, because doctors often suck. Doctors sucked before science, it's not a knowledge problem.
Yep. We also don't really understand how paracetamol works beyond knowing it does work and has very few side effects.
Really? I thought it was known that it acts as a cox-2 inhibitor selectively in the CNS?
An excellent deep dive on this is done in the "This podcast will kill you" podcast (episode 120). There are a few main theories on why but generally we don't really know much at all about its mode (or modes) of action.
Cool! Thanks for the rec. I love finding out there's way more to know about something.