Folk medicine, traditional medicine, alternative medicine, complementary medicine, wellness - it is all the same thing rebranded to be sold anew but one thing remains consistent; none of it is actual medicine.
Acupuncture is a placebo, massages are not evidence-based treatments, your Blue Apron "organic" food subscription is not preventing any illness, and so the Biden administration has rightly decreed that you can't use a Health Savings Account - untaxed funds meant to be used for medical care - and buy alternatives to medicine. Not even if you you get a doctor to give you a note saying it is real. The irony is that because his constituents overwhelmingly distrust science, his administration launched an unscientific “Food is Medicine” initiative last year.
A lawyers who claims his client, a government union employee, got cancer from using the common weedkiller Roundup,
is whining that his client didn't get to hear "key evidence" from "the World Health Organisation" that it caused cancer.
As the century turned, the science community began to become critical of a once-honored field; epidemiology. If you are not familiar with it, it is people who correlate causes to outcomes. They don't show it, they usually are not scientists, but they look for links and then if those look interesting scientists will follow up on it.
This was an occupation once so conservative and evidence-driven that they were the last to accept that heart disease and cancer might have a hereditary factor. When epidemiologists showed that smoking causes lung cancer the data were so overwhelming and comprehensive that Big Tobacco began to stockpile money for the inevitable lawsuits because they had denied it.
March is here, and with it begins a season of intense travel for me - something which for some combination of reasons has become sort of a habit. First, workshops and conferences are rarely scheduled in the December-February period. Second, the Christmas vacations put a sort of break to all activities and disrupt the flow. Third, I teach a course in the first semester, which is now over. And fourth, INFN funding mechanisms imply that it is harder to travel in those months (yearly budgets close toward the end of November, and funds become again available only a bit after the new year starts).
Food fads in the 'food is medicine' space try to use science jargon - nutriceuticals (literal food as medicine), polyphenols, prebiotics, all so they can promote fad diets around something new - like fermented foods recently.
A new
paper in Environmental Science&Technology Letters (created a decade ago to ride the 'everything causes cancer' craze) claims that not only are 'microplastics' harmful - because in modern times we can detect anything in anything and if you can detect it, it is killing you - you can and should remove them by
both boiling and filtering the water in your home.
It is so bizarre - we'd have been extinct 150,000 years ago if our bodies did not have the ability to harmlessly excrete lots and lots and lots of trace chemicals - that no mainstream media outlet would promote it.
One of the few things that can get a government union employee in a mandatory industry like education fired is hitting a student. Yet the link between increased tolerance and less accountability for students has correlated to increased violence by teachers. If there are no repercussions for behavior, behavior gets worse.
Everyone seems to know this except academic psychologists, who instead
argue that grades are the problem. Don't want to be assaulted? Don't have accountability for any student who will suffer no lasting repercussions if they assault you while if you defend yourself you will be fired, go to jail, be sued, and vilified by the internet for eternity.
Former Vice-President Al Gore has a giant mansion but buys carbon offsets to mitigate the damage. Do they work?
It depends, and that means it is unlikely. Lots of corporations dove into the carbon offset market, Mr. Gore made hundreds of millions of dollars investing in them, but
there is no standard beyond 'we will plant this many trees.' The story is certainly compelling. There is no guilt about a mansion or private plane if you pay someone to plant trees that absorb carbon dioxide emissions equal to what you burned and create wildlife habitats and nice views for humans in the process.
So-called "organic food" is a gigantic industry, $135 billion in revenue per year, augmented by a corporate panel created by the Clinton administration that exempts them from real U.S. Department of Agriculture oversight. They can exempt any synthetic ingredients they want and still sell an organic sticker (and do - dozens and dozens of them) and have insider corporations that "certify" organic status, but only make any money if they sell the stickers.
Raw milk producers are dangerous, with 700X more foodborne illness risk than pasteurized milk which has had pathogens neutralized. Raw cheese has a better safety record because folk wisdom says that after 60 days the bad stuff is dead.