Lori McClintock, wife of California Congressman Tom McClintock, believed in herbal remedies and has died from dehydration caused by gastroenteritis and whose inflammation was caused by “adverse effects of white mulberry leaf ingestion,” according to the Sacramento County coroner's report. 

Such deaths are considered accidental but if you wouldn't drink and drive on the windy roads of the Pacific Coast Highway, you shouldn't believe in folk medicine, traditional medicine, alternative medicine, complementary medicine, integrative medicine, or whatever else naturopaths and supplement charlatans are calling their dangerous money-making schemes these days.

And certainly don't believe 'weight loss' gimmicks on the Internet. As the McClintock family learned, the effects can be disastrous.


One example of marketing allowed by the efforts of the same political party that pushed unlimited student loan debt off on a generation in the 1980s and the end of nuclear energy off on us in the 1990s. This is not the product behind her death, as far as anyone knows. But I bet Re

To be fair, supplements are not always dangerous. Often they are just overpriced placebos that the Clinton administration exempted from real FDA oversight in 1994. The President who made nonsense purveyor Mark Hyman famous did a world of good fo those who believe Science Is A Vast Corporate Conspiracy - because that thinking was dominated by his political party.(1)

Condolences to Rep. McClintock. As someone who recently lost my wife (melanoma) I can feel his pain. Please, if you have an illness, go see a qualified medical professional instead of any person whose title ends in "path" or who advertises schemes on a website, and if you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more. In 100 percent of clinical trials, that works, whereas if supplements could survive double-blind clinical trials they'd be called "medicine."

NOTE:

(1) And for the most part it still is. COVID-19 flipped the script on anti-science crank representation, though. The anti-vaccine had been overwhelmingly on the left until 2021 and now they are claiming to be the Party of Science because Republicans deny the COVID-19 vaccine more - all while Democrats are still denying most other fields of science, from biology to zoology. And Rep. McClintock is a Republican, and even more rare in California a conservative, so that will lend evidence to the 2022 belief that Republicans oppose science, but women are also far more likely to embrace "natural" and supplement marketing.