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> if you want to be healthy, remove unnatural things from your body (sugar, medicines, sitting too much, etc) You should not stop using medicine without discussing this with your MD. I said medicine; you should do the same with drugs. Some drugs should not be quit cold turkey. To name one, alcohol. Furthermore, the reason you should try to not use too many medicine, is because medicine (and drugs, and herbs) have side effects. So you (and your MD) need to think critical if the good outweighs the bad, and this should be reflected throughout the lifetime of the usage of the medicine. Because before you know it, you end up using medicine B, C, and D all because of side effects related to medicine A. As for 'unnatural', criley2 touched upon that subject; how do you define that? Is synthetic counterpart always worse than natural counterpart? I find such advice downright dangerous. Following that logic, St John's Wort is always better than a synthetic anti depressant. St John's Wort has its place (if standardised!), but it has a lot of contra indications. It doesn't work well with a LOT of other medicines and drugs. For example, it is dangerous if used together with an SSRI or with MDMA. Yet, if people follow the advice by this writer, they'd prefer to resort to a herb like this (perhaps not even standardised) because "its natural". I knew people who ate raw meat regularly, and had to be administered to hospital because of food poisoning. Yet refused, because the hospital wasn't 'raw food' enough. Don't tell me this "it has to be natural" bullshit. It stems from a fear of the unknown, technology or science. It claims to argue that only Earth and nature are good. I'm not buying that (I'm not buying the 'natural is bad' either though). What is good or bad for you has to stand on its own merit. Drawing the line between 'natural' and 'unnatural' (whatever that indeed might be) is a silly oversimplification. Don't buy into it! People who use it are trying to grab your money out of your pocket to make a run for it. |
It seems highly relevant since there seems to be some quibbling about using the word natural and that it has no meaning (I agree, but another comment mentioned exactly what Taleb meant by natural).