Where did that unecesary snarky comment come from?
How Would You Spend $1T a year?
- Thread starter Triskelion
- Start date
I'd rather feed them with less-expensive, scientifically proven equally-healthy GMO foods.
Me, too. Raised organically. Because for almost all of the GMO foods we've seen, the problem isn't the foods themselves, so much as that they are made resistant to certain pesticides (Round-Up, mainly) that we then spray hell out of them with until the resultant food IS a problem.
Nothing wrong with organically grown Golden Rice, though.
Oversensitive much? Frankly, I think being presented with the hypothetical scenario of being given more money than one could ever possibly spend on oneself, and fantasizing about using it to screw over three hundred million people in order to make even more money is worthy of some snark.
So does that mean this is Snark Week on the Discovery Channel? 
srsly, tsq, well said.
srsly, tsq, well said.
That's not how that works. Not remotely.
For one, Round up is much LESS toxic than the preferred "organic" pesticides. It's LD50 level is like half that of ordinary table salt. Rotenone, one of the most common "organic" pesticides is 25x more toxic than Roundup. Also, organic pesticides break down faster, so it is actually they that need to be sprayed more often.
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The worst thing we ever developed wasn't the drill head--but the plow.
Likewise. Instead of deletions--I might pay hookers and private eyes to infiltrate Washington. Bribes alone for spaceflight won't work--you have to have pictures to send to their wives to really get anything done.
Likewise. Instead of deletions--I might pay hookers and private eyes to infiltrate Washington. Bribes alone for spaceflight won't work--you have to have pictures to send to their wives to really get anything done.
Someone I know on FB posted a stupid fearmongering, antiscience meme about how evil Monsanto's glyphosate was turning up not only on regular crops but on organic crops too and how it giving us all cancer or allergies or something.
I only commented, "Glyphosate's organic. Just sayin'."
Totally got unfriended for that.
Those people are my bane. If I were my avatar, they would comprise the majority of my diet.
I hear anti-science memes a lot, because my little brother is a chiropractor who totally bought into all the woo they teach at chiropractic school. (Also I have a lot of hippie-class FB friends.)
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Oh god I SO empathize. My sister-in-law is an acupuncturist!
The only way it could be worse... if they were homeopaths!
Dude. My older half sister works part time selling for a homeopath. She and my half brother are also anti-vax.
But my half sister is also super conservative in a lot of ways -- that weird breed of hippie woo-woo California Republican. We are basically polar opposites.
On the surface I understand that sentiment, the problem is that, it doesn't work. People may think it does, but that's not the same thing. As Tim Minchin said about alternative medicine, it's just another name for "medicine that's not been proved to work or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine."I tend toward skepticism when it comes to alternative medicine. But if it works for other people (including those reading this thread), then more power to them.
Kor
When people talk about alternative medicine working for them, they are using anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is worse than unreliable, because it is so deeply rooted in bias that it tends not only to be inaccurate, but to actively guide us away from the truth. Generally, what is happening when people think alternative medicine has worked for them is a combination of confirmation bias, the placebo effect, and the fact that about 80% of disease, if left untreated, gets better on its own. That means, for example, that homeopaths (who literally offer nothing), automatically have an 80% "success" rate. That seems dandy until they try to treat cancer.
People may cite the placebo effect as good enough -- "hey, it makes them feel better, so does it matter if it really works?" Well, maybe for things like pain management it doesn't. But take for example one well-conducted asthma study: In the study they compared three groups -- a group treated with a standard albuterol rescue inhaler, a group treated with a placebo inhaler, and a group treated with alternative medicine. All groups self-reported how their asthma symptoms felt after treating attacks with one of the three treatments. All groups were also given an objective test of lung-capacity. While all groups reported feeling better, only the group that received real medicine actually had improved lung capacity.
This leads to the ethical question, to the answer of your "more power to them." I say, no way. When people treat fake medicine like real medicine, and think it's okay to try to provide fake medicine to those suffering real illness, then there are very, very real consequences. There's a website called What's the Harm that keeps obituary tabs on the people who die from alternative medicine, either directly, or indirectly because real medical treatment was delayed beyond the point where it could have saved them.
You may have seen a couple stories making the news rounds too: a permanently disabled young woman pushing for her parents to be prosecuted for delaying her treatment and trying faith healing instead (alternative medicine is just faith healing dressed up in a pseudoscientific package, after all), and the Canadian toddler who died of meningitis because his parents went to a naturopath instead of a real doctor.
Alternative medicine is an artificial construct created by people who are either self-deluded or trying to scam the most vulnerable in our society. I regard it with a mixture of sadness and loathing.
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Some resources, if you're interested:
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=alternative+medicine
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alternative_medicine
http://www.quackwatch.com/
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=alternative+medicine
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alternative_medicine
http://www.quackwatch.com/
Well, yes. I knew an older guy with a heart condition who opted to go with an alternative treatment instead of real medicine. Sadly, he passed away, while I don't doubt that science-based medicine would have given him many more years.
For the occasional back soreness, I will go in for chiropractic and a massage. But that's different.
Kor
There are "good" chiros. They're the ones who acknowledge that they're basically glorified massage therapists with a bit of osteopath thrown in. But if they start talking to you about "cleanses" and your kid's vaccine schedule, RUN, because they have drifted into the Looniverse.
