Natural Cures

DocBrain just watched the Kevin Trudeau infomercial. Using the style of modern news reporting, he skewers Pharma and the FDA. The elements of that style, for those who don't know, are to have a villain, victim and hero, allowing you, the sheeple, to identify with the victim so that you can be cured by the hero, in this case Kevin Trudeau and his "cures".

DocBrain is a big believer in alternative and complementary medicine, and a big believer in the value of prevention.

Remember that everything that happens to you is a matter of chance and that your lifestyle changes the odds of both good and bad. So, it is possible to live to be 100 years old and to do this while smoking 3 packs of cigarettes/day. What makes it chance? Intangibles and human variability. Exposure to stealth viruses, specific genetic coding of an individual, bad luck of a gamma ray hitting a specific chromosome in a specific cell at a specific time during mitosis, something distracting your attention at a specific time, or even a thought that imbeds itself into your mind. And many more things. Believe me, God is not out to get you, nor will God always protect you. You do need to take care of yourself, but also need not to obscess about it. Just do it.


So, exercise, sleep and eat properly, say your prayers and take your vitamins, avoid obvious risky things (such as tobacco, heavy alcohol use, street drugs, and obesity), have a positive attitude and a good sense of humor, and, if you do all of the above and still have problems, get additional advice from your doctor for prevention and treatment of disease, but do not stop all the other good things you are doing unless specifically told to do so by your doctor.

What about alternative medicines? Here is what you need to know.

1. The scientific standard is randomized, double blind, placebo controlled studies. This will create a result that gives the probability that a treatment will help you. There are few products which produce 100% cure rates where a placebo produces a 0% cure rate. So, it always comes down to statistics and probability of a treatment leading to benefit, harm, or doing absolutely nothing.
2. Few natural, complementary, and alternative treatments have been tested with this scientific standard. This is in part due to the large cost of doing such a study with the degree of rigor required to get a valid result. This is a perfect place for government funding. Opposing these studies are the manufacturers and purveyors of complementary products, who fear that their treatment will be exposed as an expensive placebo. They often couch their objections in terms of anecdotal medicine, the fuel of infomercials. For example, they will admit that their treatment doesn't cure everyone, but that some people have had marvelous and remarkable success. That this can also happen with placebo, spontaneously, or coincidentally and not causally, is the variable that you are not told.
3. Some treatments are innocuous; others are dangerous; others are only dangerous when combined with something else. If you plan to use complementary or alternative treatments, make sure you know the potential dangers and let your doctor know what you are taking.
4. Even a grass roots type of organization is better than nothing. www.remedyfind.com is one such web site that gives the devil its due. On that site, you will find the good, bad and ugly anecdotes for all kinds of treatments. This is truly a non-biased site that adds to the knowledge base of health care.