[freehunter]

I’ve been astounded here today by the number of otherwise scientifically minded people who are seriously interested in homeopathic remedies. At the risk of running afoul of dang again, can I ask what is so attractive about trying to find medical purposes for scented oils when medical science has yet to prove any effect beyond pure placebo?

I lost all interest in the subject when Steve Jobs tried to use herbal remedies to cure cancer and, despite running the most profitable company in the world, died of an easily curable form of cancer. What is it that makes people so hesitant to believe medical science and so willing to believe an article on the Internet saying that lavender oil applied to the humors can cure diseases? I know so many people who forget that “essential” means “the essence/scent of” and not “required for life” and I’ve never been able to figure out why without them getting offended and shutting down.

[smallnamespace]

> what is so attractive about trying to find medical purposes for scented oils when medical science has yet to prove any effect beyond pure placebo

There is a risk here of going down the road of scientism, which is to conflate empiricism and the scientific method itself with a specific, imperfect implementation of it.

I've looked into this myself, and the profit motive for doing well-funded research on plants as a potential medicine are probably 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than for pharmaceuticals that are much easier to control and patent. It can take ~billions to develop a new drug and get it through the FDA process, and it's the potential profits that actually fund the research.

This level of research funding is obviously never going to happen under the current incentive and regulatory structure for investigating plants that anyone can buy for a few dollars, even if those same plants worked just as well as a pharmaceutical drug.

Science is like a high focused searchlight. It obviously isn't going to find things that it doesn't focus much on.

That doesn't mean the things that science has left only briefly examined definitely work (and I anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you something), but it does mean that the universe of true facts is much wider than the universe of things that have been definitively proven through science.

[freehunter]

I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Many medicines we have are plant-based, and pharmaceutical companies make tons from them. What they do is figure out what about the plant actually works, simulate it with other chemicals, and then sell that. I mean Oxy is super profitable and it’s literally refined cocaine, which is as vegan as you can get.

Under the current incentive and regulatory structure, it seems like literally anything they can prove works, they can get a patent on. Pharma companies are so money hungry that if tea tree oil really did cure cancer, they’d refine it and patent that shit in a heartbeat.

The fact that they haven’t says so much to me.

[smallnamespace]

> What they do is figure out what about the plant actually works, simulate it with other chemicals, and then sell that

That sort of presupposes that what 'works' about the plant is a single, potent 'active ingredient' that can be identified/refined/purified/synthesized; in other words, this requires you to assume that what is convenient for an industrialized pharmaceutical industry is also an accurate reflection of how human health and nature work.

But what if it were the case that the whole plant extract that is actually the most effective, and depends on some synergistic spectrum of phytochemical compounds?

Note that I'm not saying this is necessarily true, but the way the system up we have a chicken and egg scenario here:

1. If it were true that whole plant extracts were more effective for some conditions, you'd need to do a lot of research to prove it, but the research funding presupposes the potential for profit

2. There's no incentive to change the profit incentives currently (where 'find, extract, patent, synthesize is the default assumption), since we don't have much evidence that we should change those incentives

This is a self-reinforcing set of norms, and changing them would require 'extraordinary evidence', except the norms themselves discourage looking for that evidence. Just look at the state of marijuana research over the last 4 decades as one particularly egregious example.

> if tea tree oil really did cure cancer, they’d refine it and patent that shit in a heartbeat

Not if the pharmacologically active ingredient is present in sufficient quantities in the raw plant as well.

You can certainly patent it, but you won't be able to make a profit since people can just go buy/grow the raw plant.

And if backwards induct from that fact, you find that under under very few scenarios would it be rational to dump research money into it since the people paying for it would never (directly) see a return, even if society as a whole benefits.

[newnewpdro]

> I mean Oxy is super profitable and it’s literally refined cocaine, which is as vegan as you can get.

Opium poppy != Coca plant

As for your other statements, there's actually an abundance of medicinal plants and herbs which are not commercialized due to having dose:response curves too unpredictable to be productized and sold to a litigious public.

Medicinal value != commercial value

[dizzystar]

The list of impactful plants in medicine includes the yew tree.

[cratermoon]

Digitalis aka Foxglove is the source of cardiac glycosides, which has been used for many years to treat cardiac arrhythmias.

[johtso]

You seem to be conflating homeopathy with herbal remedies. Two totally different things.

Homeopathy involves diluting things until you're left with nothing but a sugar pill.

Herbal remedies involve contact with actual ingredients that may or may not have useful properties.

[ianai]

You’ve confused homeopathy with herbalism/home remedies/supplementation. Homeopathy is basically “if weakened virii inoculate people against infection then surely weakened versions of toxins should do the same.” Herbs and supplements are, at best, whole plant medications. St Johns Wort is prescription only in other countries because it’s very effective against major depression and other things.

Some people go down this route for financial reasons. It is much cheaper for someone without insurance to treat things with OTC things than actually getting insurance while tackling a disease, disorder, or etc.

TLDR: Steve Jobs made a poor life choice. But that doesn’t make everyone not taking chemo or other cancer treatments an idiot. Those are typically prohibitively expensive treatments.