Dan Hannan: The madness of the precautionary principle
17 Apr 2013, 8:26 pm
jagatai wrote:
Tensu wrote:
Statistically relevant tests cost lots of money, and It's my understanding that herbal remedies cannot be patented.
So you would be sending all that time and money on testing, likely going deeply into debt, only to have to compete with a bunch of growers that don't.
Some herbal remedies don't work. Many do. Nobody is going to spend the money to figure out which is which, which is a shame considering how cheaply such remedies can be produced.
Isn't it enough to warn customers that no modern test has been done, just the records of medieval monks, greek philosophers, and native american medicine men ? After all, how is that any less ethical than asking people to participate in a study to test a new drug? Well, I guess in that scenario you pay them, but at least you're not giving sick people placebos.
So you would be sending all that time and money on testing, likely going deeply into debt, only to have to compete with a bunch of growers that don't.
Some herbal remedies don't work. Many do. Nobody is going to spend the money to figure out which is which, which is a shame considering how cheaply such remedies can be produced.
Isn't it enough to warn customers that no modern test has been done, just the records of medieval monks, greek philosophers, and native american medicine men ? After all, how is that any less ethical than asking people to participate in a study to test a new drug? Well, I guess in that scenario you pay them, but at least you're not giving sick people placebos.
Actually companies do spend the money to determine what herbal remedies work. They are called pharmaceutical companies and often the drugs they produce are the purified and controlled versions of a chemical that was found in nature.
But despite your claim, actually few of the standard herbal remedies work. Even the ones that do work (St. john's Wort, for example) can vary greatly between batches making it hard to get consistent results.
It seems that your argument is since it costs too much to determine if herbal remedies are actually effective, we should not demand that sellers make honest claims about their products? If someone claims he has as pill that, when dropped into water, creates gasoline, shouldn't he prove unequivocally that his product does what he says before we give him money? If someone says dandelion root cures cancer wouldn't you want proof before stoping other proven therapies? If you are willing to accept the unproven claims just because it cost too much to actually prove the claims, then you get the kind of treatment that comes from unproven claims.
I'm not saying modern medicine has all the answers. But at least it has some answers that work. There are very few herbal remedies that do anything at all, let alone do what their sellers claim they do.
Wow... Not what I was saying at all.
I'm not saying testing isn't important. I'm saying that if someone wants to take an untested product, that they have the right to.
17 Apr 2013, 10:33 pm
Tensu wrote:
jagatai wrote:
Tensu wrote:
Statistically relevant tests cost lots of money, and It's my understanding that herbal remedies cannot be patented.
So you would be sending all that time and money on testing, likely going deeply into debt, only to have to compete with a bunch of growers that don't.
Some herbal remedies don't work. Many do. Nobody is going to spend the money to figure out which is which, which is a shame considering how cheaply such remedies can be produced.
Isn't it enough to warn customers that no modern test has been done, just the records of medieval monks, greek philosophers, and native american medicine men ? After all, how is that any less ethical than asking people to participate in a study to test a new drug? Well, I guess in that scenario you pay them, but at least you're not giving sick people placebos.
So you would be sending all that time and money on testing, likely going deeply into debt, only to have to compete with a bunch of growers that don't.
Some herbal remedies don't work. Many do. Nobody is going to spend the money to figure out which is which, which is a shame considering how cheaply such remedies can be produced.
Isn't it enough to warn customers that no modern test has been done, just the records of medieval monks, greek philosophers, and native american medicine men ? After all, how is that any less ethical than asking people to participate in a study to test a new drug? Well, I guess in that scenario you pay them, but at least you're not giving sick people placebos.
Actually companies do spend the money to determine what herbal remedies work. They are called pharmaceutical companies and often the drugs they produce are the purified and controlled versions of a chemical that was found in nature.
But despite your claim, actually few of the standard herbal remedies work. Even the ones that do work (St. john's Wort, for example) can vary greatly between batches making it hard to get consistent results.
It seems that your argument is since it costs too much to determine if herbal remedies are actually effective, we should not demand that sellers make honest claims about their products? If someone claims he has as pill that, when dropped into water, creates gasoline, shouldn't he prove unequivocally that his product does what he says before we give him money? If someone says dandelion root cures cancer wouldn't you want proof before stoping other proven therapies? If you are willing to accept the unproven claims just because it cost too much to actually prove the claims, then you get the kind of treatment that comes from unproven claims.
I'm not saying modern medicine has all the answers. But at least it has some answers that work. There are very few herbal remedies that do anything at all, let alone do what their sellers claim they do.
Wow... Not what I was saying at all.
I'm not saying testing isn't important. I'm saying that if someone wants to take an untested product, that they have the right to.
I agree they have a right to make it. They just should be prevented from selling it with the grossly false claims that it is going to cure things that it has not been proven to cure.
_________________
Never let the weeds get higher than the garden,
Always keep a sapphire in your mind.
(Tom Waits "Get Behind the Mule")
