Snapshot9 said:
Anyone just dismisses 'Natural cures' as nonsense,
they need to read the life story of 'Edgar Cayce',
titled 'There is a river'. It is an interesting read,
and just might alter your opinion.
There's no such thing as a natural cure. ALL treatments for all illnesses come from something in nature, but people seem to think that just because a chemist worked on them for a while they become less 'natural'. Here's a list of some popular cures, look at how nautral their sources are:
- infections: Penicillin came originally from mold, or from the bacteria that causes it. Vancomycin, which is much more powerful, came from a similar strain.
- malaria: Quinine, is a drug made from chinchilla bark. Before the drug was developed they used to make tea from the bark itself, which was often unsuccessful.
- polio: no cure, but the vaccine is made from a drug called (i think) formalin, which was developed by combining three strains of the virus in a sheep's kidney and then extracting the animal's antibodies.
- rabies: no cure, but the vaccine, imovax, effectively removes the disease if administered during the incubation period. The drug actually comes from human antibodies extracted from infected cells.
Even the most exotic medical treatments, such as radiotherapy for cancer patients, use materials found in nature. Scientists usually mess with the materials for a while, but this is usually to make them easier to work with and to refine the treatment process.
I often hear people talk about how they prefer herbal alternatives to drugs, not realizing that no matter what you take to treat an illness, it's still a pharmacological agent (i.e. a drug), and often with the same side effects. Take chinchilla bark, for example. When it was used to make tea it used to cause the patients extreme physical discomfort (often much worse than the malaria itself) and frequently they died anyways because the tea form of the drug wasn't that powerful. This 'herbal' remedy was far less effective than the refined Quinine developed by chemists, which even if it cause the horrible side effects, at least the patient ended up cured of malaria, and alive.
The ONLY reason that any potentially helpful drugs are kept from the general public by the authorities is because a) they want to make sure that the drugs really work, and b) they want to make sure that they don't do more harm than good.
