Tradition > Rhinos?

I know I’ve talked about this before but it’s one of the most disgusting things that are happening in the world today. With an extremely simple scientific explanation, it’s clear that rhino horn, made of keratin, is just the same as our hair or nails. People looking for medicinal properties in rhino horn should probably just cut their hair and stew it up. But no, instead, for the sake of creating traditional chinese medicines, endangered species of rhino are being slaughtered for their horns, horns that are no more medicinal than our fingernails.

And it’s not even that this is a remnant of times long gone, the number is actually growing by 6% a year, with 2011 seeing 448 killed for this purpose, and as alternative medicine becomes a movement within itself, this makes me very worried for our wildlife. For a movement that has clung on so hard to the ‘natural’ label, destroying what little we have left of this threatened creature is, to me, ironic to the point of ripping my hairs out.

Perhaps if I do, they can use it in traditional medicines, perhaps I’ll treat it with something so that it looks the same as a rhino horn. I wonder how much that would cost, because it would probably be more than worth it…

According to the BBC, the South African rhino population is quickly approaching the point where birth rate will exceed death rate, and for what?

Sending endangered creatures into decline because governments are reluctant to provide real healthcare for people? Sending endangered creatures into decline because a small group of people don’t trust lifesaving treatments backed up by actual evidence, because they’ve had bad experiences with physicians?

Surely no matter how much of the kool aid you’ve drunk on this issue, this is clearly wrong. I dare you to try and justify this.

Delicious Medicine!

Before I reinstall battle for middle earth on my PC in anticipation of a break from blogging… it’s blog time!

Thinking back to my post the other day about homeopathy being reclassified as confectionery struck a thought that comes up over and over again when the issue of something ‘paranormal’ or ‘alternative’ comes up, and one that is usually unanswerable unless you somehow have worked out how to live inside other peoples’ minds and read their thoughts while you chillax in a sun lounger with some neuronal martinis, electric, not hormonal.

How can you tell whether someone’s lying or whether they believe?

In this case, I can’t see how anyone who truly believes in homeopathy would not be offended by a reclassification of this kind. Sure, it means that they can take the medication they want in a way that goes unscrutinized by mainstream medicine and its allies, but it undervalues its appreciation as (what they actually believe it to be) a subcategory of medicine. Which, for the record, it isn’t. That’s not the point however; as much as I’m sure that there are some believers that think this is a good move, it just doesn’t make sense to me that they can think that way and still believe in it.

If someone tried to reclass, say, vaccines as confectionery (leaving out of course the fact that sweets aren’t usually injected into you and actually taste nice) I, and the majority of people (I hope) would be outraged.

I wouldn’t answer to this abuse of classification power by declaring ‘yes, vaccines should be classified as medicine, but I’ll be damned if I don’t admit that they’re tasty!’

Confectionery: Now With Extra Mostly Water

So, for those of you who want to take snake oil there may be a new way for you to get your hands on unlicensed products without having to have ‘that’ chat about how there’s no evidence for homeopathy.

That’s right, with the new unbannable homeopathy, you can buy your bogus medical ailments as confectionery, eliminating any need to back up the efficacy of your chosen genre of bollocks, and protecting your right to not have your snake oil regulated into submission by the government for not having any benefits at all!

Our new homeopathy branding, coming in 2025 will also silence critics by declaring that an argument against homepahty is an argument against chocolate, but we’re working on that. Being in the confectionery side of things has a lot of benefits you see?

So next time you’re feeling ill and you don’t feel like you can stomach anything stronger than a placebo, remember, don’t check the pharmacy, check your local sweet shop; we’re in between the sherbet lemons and the chocolate fudge.

Sunday Hangover: A Phallic Solution To A Phallus Problem

Welcome to the Sunday segment where I spout utter crap from my fingers in a vain attempt to try to bring levity, brevity and humour to this blog as well as trying to fulfill the ‘idiocy’ section of the blog’s tagline.

Today I would like to ponder over a topic mentioned on Russell Howard’s Good News but I can’t for the life of me find any sources for this.

It stands to reason I suppose, that something as absurd as trying to cure erectile dysfunction by hanging a weight off of your penis with a sash and then swinging it back and forth would disappear from the internet, or never be mentioned on it at all.

Although I suspect it’ll make it onto a fetish site somewhere in the dark bowels that lie outside of the republic of internet, on the questionable erotica isle.

Really though, how stoned do you have to be to think that would work?

And even after a couple of tainted brownies; what would convince you to sell this to other people?

More importantly… what the hell are people doing actually buying sessions?

I suppose there are weirder things in Chinese medicine, God only knows how many rhinos we would have saved if people lost faith in the ancient art of pretending that the body parts of endangered creatures could get your dick hard.

I would like to propose that we work out a way to sell people the placebos they want without hurting any creature or any penis, whether it be attached to them or not.

Perhaps we could market donating to charity as a medicine? It’s more believable than the real suggestions and it would probably have a much better effect on the person donating, not to mention the society we’re trying to champion.

Is Anything Truly Crazy?

I’m going to point you in the direction of an awesome piece of satire today, because it made me laugh and because it’s the style that I would like to be presenting if the ideas didn’t keep getting taken first. Take a look at the daily mash’s dietopathy article here and prepare to be amazed at the it-could-be-true story.

Seriously though, there’s a lot of crazy going on all around us that we just don’t pay a lot of attention to. There’s a clinic about five minutes walk away from my house where they offer just about every bogus treatment under the sun with little explanation as to how their conflicting philosophies could all work at once.

It boggles the mind to think how many contradictions there can be in one person’s belief system and it still make sense to them. I suppose I’ve had more than my fair share of cognitive dissonance in the past and that for me makes it even more intriguing. Because as someone who now wears the skeptic badge with pride I wrestled with just about everything under the sun and almost fell the other way.

And in a world where anyone’s idea is as good as anyone else’s idea we leave ourselves open for that. When we suppress criticism of ideas because everyone’s supposed to get a fair share, when we create false balance in an argument that only has evidence on one side and when we let the market decide what’s right and wrong instead of actually testing for efficacy this breakdown of reality into a mishmash of conflicting beliefs occurs, a mishmash that is resolved in different ways by each individual mind.

And there’s no easy answer when you don’t know the arguments against the unsupported beliefs.

Without the knowledge of fallacious arguments, what constitutes evidence, what makes a hoax, how to deceive yourself and the other trip ups of the brain’s ability to reason…

Well I’m not surprised that the question doesn’t resolve itself as easily as scientific analysis should make it so, and it’s not the fault of the believer, nor is it truly the fault of the hoaxer unless they truly have no empathy, it’s more a fault with the way our brain works, and the processes it needs to go through to decide what’s real and what’s not in the world.

It’s easy to dismiss someone as crazy but we all have a little bit (sometimes a big bit) of irrationality in us.

As beings capable of complex thought however, we have a choice.

A choice of whether to let our instincts decide what’s real and what’s not, or whether to let the results of vigorous tests and systematic analyses investigate how the world works before we claim we know one way or the other.

Personally, once I realised there was a distinction, I fell into the latter camp, but it took me a long time, and I don’t pretend that I’ve completely lost my naivety.

At least not intentionally anyway.

What’s The Harm? Well…

I’ve got another answer to that age old question in relation to the kind of fake medicine I often rant about on here. So, despite the many answers and to it and the many people ignoring those many answers and the many times I’ve used the word many unnecessarily in this sentence.

So, what’s the harm?

Take a look here.

This just goes to show that anyone can claim to be qualified. And I’m not talking about just Gillian McKeith (sp?) (not that it matters how I spell the name of someone whose career is long, long dead).

You can claim to be a holistic healer with nothing to back it up, the title essentially means nothing, there is no way to tell who knows what they’re talking about and who doesn’t.

The thing is however, that when you’re talking about using any treatment that’s not proven to be effective you’re not going to get any positive effect that isn’t a placebo.

And to be honest, if you’re going to be serving up arsenic, no matter how natural it might be, you should really stop referring to your healing as ‘of the whole self’ and start referring to it as chelation therapy, not that it would make it any safer.

So yes, despite caller herself a ‘holistic healer’, Selena Tsui caused one of her ‘patients’ to lose the use of all four of her limbs.

And although there was a payout, she should surely be facing much worse charges, this changes someone’s life, and not in a good way.

<img src=2http://blog.ukmedix.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/holistic-health.jpg"

So what’s the harm?

Well, this is the harm.

Not that I needed to tell you that.

An Entire Species > Your Superstition

Take a look here.

The international union for the conservation of nature announced recently that the northern white rhino and the javan rhino are now ‘possibly extinct’, obviously it’s pretty difficult to determine if every single one has been wiped out but this is pretty sad news.

This is sad news for the beauty of biodiversity and the other benefits offered by broader heterozygosity.

But do not be mistaken, this is sad news for humankind as well, because we played a large role in this, and in particular the practice of traditional chinese medicine played a huge role in the poaching of the rhinoceros for its horn. A horn that is made primarily from keratin and which contains no medicinal properties whatsoever that fingernails or the human hair would not be able to provide.

So despite the fact that there is no science to show any benefit to the use of rhino horn in medicine, and despite the fact that it is clear that this apathy towards inter-special genocide is a bad thing for the biosphere, it’s not stopping.

People are still spouting superstitious reasons to use rhino horn for remedies with no effect, people are still contributing to the destruction of the rhinoceros for the benefit of no-one except themselves and their wallets.

And for those of you who’ll back this up by citing the placebo effect, is it really worth the slaughter of these endangered species for an effect you can get by any intervention?

Would it not be simpler to, I don’t know, get a treatment that doesn’t involve wiping out this rare and beautiful creatures?

Superstition is no excuse for this, no matter how nicely you dress it up.

This is wrong, and the ethical connotations of this should have been enough to stop this practice years ago.

Alas, people do not always listen to reason.

Deception In Your Best Interests?

How much goes unnoticed during our daily lives? How much bs just goes under the radar and taken for granted? Whether due to the influence of an authority figure or due to a lack of the information needed to extrapolate the origin of a claim or a product, surely people and companies should be more upfront about what they want their products/services to stand for and stick their claims out there on the face of it, rather than leaving them sitting quietly behind until someone who agrees with the principle hops along. At which point of course the happy load of bollocks comes leaping out with a smile on its phallic face and its heavily memorised buzzwords in tow.

Alas, I don’t know anything close to the amount of marketing knowledge you need in order to make sense of their strategies, and what I’d want them to do as a more reasonable approach would probably break some sort of secret code.

So as we avoid talking about marketing club let’s move on shall we?

As a somewhat mild example of this, depending on your opinion of the subject and the degree to which you feel it affects the world (despite the consequences of a growth in the market for this kind of stuff) is the way that, especially in more rural or upper class areas, it’s hard to find food at restaurants or cafés that isn’t organic.

Whether it turns out to be ice cream in Devon or a sandwich in John Lewis, despite their target market obviously being rather susceptible to this crap, as they are to a certain much more dangerous subgenre of lies, I would quite like to be able to have the choice between organic and non-organic food and not have to go with the organic option.

I’d rather have my food grown easily in a sustainable manner, using less resources and with other crops in enough mass that it’s not a collosal waste of money and land that could be used for, let’s say, growing more crops, possibly even to people that need them.

I find it very ironic within the organic food circles that not only are people claiming it’s good for the environment (unsustainable nature in the face of a growing population doesn’t really amount to that) but that those who can afford food are driving forward a cause that prevents the amount of food we can grow in a certain space, therefore giving less chance for the people who really need it to eat.

The same could be said of alternative medicine in a sense, where there is a strong movement across many people who have plenty of money for drugs and health insurance, that are fighting for a cause that will make it more difficult for families who can’t afford basic medical care to make the right choices with the little money they have.

Some people can’t manage the basics, let them take priority before you start shoving your unproven ideologies onto them.

Definitive Ambiguity!

I thought today I’d ponder over one of those words that has always seemed incredibly vague to me. Of course there are always certain concepts that drift from their original meaning and become open to interpretation but surely there is still some sense of certainty in a definition, with ambiguity of phrase, does a word not become redundant in the fact that it no longer truly describes anything? Words are used to express what we experience through language and words that express an open-ended transparency of a definition does not truly express anything. Certainly with the one I’m thinking of, it is embraced by many different people of many dissenting viewpoints to mean their interpretation of it, often leading to each end of the definition patting each other on the backs for conforming to this vague word, and as such, confusing each other’s ideologies as the same.

So, what does spirituality actually mean?

If you think about it, I’m sure those of you who would consider yourselves spiritual have some sort of definition for it in your head, one that you fall into by the nature of this construct, but even those of us who do not, there must be some kind of meaning your brains puts towards it, lest we neglect using it at all, which I often do if I’m being honest, given the positive connotations in undoubtedly gives despite the horrible things some people do in the name of spirituality.

According to wikipedia, admittedly an unreliable source, spirituality refers to the belief of an ultimate and immaterial reality, something that admittedly, many people who consider themselves spiritual believe in. It is believed to allow a person to discover the inner values by which people live.

This second part, I have heard used to describe spirituality before, but it falls incredibly far from the previous definition that it should really be referred to as something else, most simply being a good judge of character, which many people are.

However, even excluding this the term remains incredibly vague, with many people of many different ideologies stepping on the same ground and proclaiming them part of the same belief system. This however, due to the nature of the different anti-materialistic views of reality, cannot be true. Many of them are as different from each other as they are from materialism, which makes it astonishing that there are people who practice them all at once, using special pleading to explain why they can all exist under one universal roof.

Unfortunately for them we are confined to one reality, one set of rules for the universe.

So it’s time for them to make up their minds.

That’s The Spirit

…so in light of the germ theory of disease and its implications, is there any room for ancient chinese medicine?

Well, not if it’s intention is to cure people of their ailments at least, since it is incredibly clear that the germ theory of disease has managed to identify much more that imbalances in spirit ever did.

Can we say clearly then that there is likely no such thing as a spirit?

Not the one above, that film, unfortunately, exists, although any movie that’s rated ‘two thumbs up’ should probably be looked at with about as much scepticism.

Well, it depends how you picture a spirit, if it exists outside a testable realm there is absolutely no way we can ever prove or disprove its existence, however, if you believe there is evidence that the spirit exists, then surely that evidence is testable, and therefore we would have the ability to test its plausibility.

It just so happens that when people have strokes, or brain damage, and lose certain bits of their personality, that would imply that the spirit, if it exists, does not contain our personality, and that our personality, language etc. are a phenomenon with its root in neurology rather than spirituality.

With that in mind, what is left for a spirit to encompass?

Just the simple fact of being alive?

Because in that case, when does something gain a spirit?

Single celled organisms?

Viruses?

Only humans?

It can’t be just me that sees this reasoning as rather convoluted, with the boundary of when we can say something is alive infinitely blurry, when, if ever, would the concept of a spirit manifest?

And back on the subject of medicine, if chakra, or qi, was indeed the source of our ailments, would it not make sense that techniques based on the manipulation of these techniques would produce more than just a placebo effect? Would surgery or drugs disturb this pattern due to their workings on a biochemical and physical basis?

Due to the fact that science based medicine has done wonders for human health since the inception of the germ theory of disease into our culture, and that the efficacy of alternative practices is much less than viable, can we not postulate that one method of treating ailments is superior to the other?

And could it be the one that has actually been proven to work?

This is not to say it’s not possible for different interpretations of the spirit to be correct, however implausible they may be considering what we know about the universe so far, but that these aspects surely have been long put to bed, and the fact that they still (ironically) haunt modern culture is more than disturbing considering the wilful ignorance it takes to ignore the mounting evidence to the contrary.