Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Minor Rant: "Natural" Cures

An acquaintance posted a link on Facebook with the commentary, "Nature does provide the cures for what she throws at us. It's just up to us to find them and use them. We don't need all the chemicals we take in. We really don't." I decided to dig in a little bit further as to what they were talking about. It turns out that the "cure" was a protein extracted from a natural source, then "glued" onto a nanoparticle (no detail of what the nanoparticle was made out of), then the nanoparticle had "bumpers" (again, no detail of what the bumpers were made of, but I doubt it was sugar and spice and everything nice. Probably more Compound X) added to it, so that human cells wouldn't hit the peptide, but viruses would. If this is what passes as "natural," then, to quote Andre the Giant, "I don't think that word means what you think it does." That being said, I don't really understand the fetish about "natural" and "artificial," especially in the medicinal context. Every time someone says "it's natural," all I think about is questions around "well, what's my dosage going to be like?" or "What's my lot to lot variability?" There are a lot of really nice toxins out there in the natural world.