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[–] 56 points 1 year ago (8 children)

'Vibe-healing.'

We await AI homeopathy healers.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    I'm pretty sure I already saw an article where a guy replaced his table salt with some other form of sodium because chat gpt suggested it. He ended up giving himself a disease that's been mostly eradicated in the modern day.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    A poisoning that's rarely seen anymore but used to be more common. The heaps of data on bromism over the decades must not have made it into the training data.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Probably made it into the training data, but he didn't ask the right prompt to make it spit out the info.

    ChatGPT isn't very good at grasping intent or considering consequences before you ask about specific things. It's still more A than I lol

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  • [–] 70 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    https://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/

    Still the best explanation of homeopathy out there on the internet.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I hate it how people are willing to trust any shady person in the name of alternative medicine. Sure, regular medicine has it's flaws, but the solution is better research, not alt medicine peddled by the shadiest people imaginable.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Just like anything else, there are shady doctors, nurses, etc. and there are shady alternative medicine people. The only reason pharma aren't using herbs and such is because they can't patent them. It's easier to make them consistent as well. I could give you a shit ton of articles on both sides of this discussion.

    The MD's aren't even being trained to help people anymore. They're being trained to survive med school and their student loans. Once they get experience, they're trained how to deal with insurance companies.

    Our healthcare is in a world of hurt so start looking inward first and fix that.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Big pharma absolutely can patent drugs extracted from herbs. The reason you don't see lots of them is that lots of them didn't work very well and the ones that did were all isolated and turned into medicine decades ago, so the patents have expired, and they're generally sold under medicine-sounding names rather than the names of the plant them came from. E.g. Aspirin was originally made from modified willow extract, and was discovered because willow was a known natural remedy and so was a good candidate for further investigation. Also, the requirement that a newly discovered drug needs to be proven to be effective to be licensed is a big hurdle lots of natural remedies don't manage to clear.

    Even despite that, though, big pharma does sell natural remedies. The difference is that they don't claim they're medicine. If they only claim they're a food supplement or something else that's only medicine-adjacent, there's no requirement to prove efficacy.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I don't claim to know everything, but the way you form these sentences is suspect.

    drugs extracted from herbs

    modified willow extract

    Also, this

    Our healthcare is in a world of hurt so start looking inward first and fix that.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Willow bark contains salicin. Things made from willow bark have been used for a very long time as herbal remedies. In the early 1800s, people figured out how to isolate it and also break it down and oxidise it to make salicylic acid. They tried using what they'd extracted as medicine as they knew it had an effect on the body, and that was the height of the bar back then. It generally did much more harm than good, but eventually some things were discovered that it genuinely helped treat. In the late 1800s, people had figured out that if you tried subjecting known bioactive compounds to chemical reactions, sometimes you ended up with a new bioactive compound - that was how diamorphine (heroin) was first synthesised from morphine, for example. Someone tried an esterification reaction with salicylic acid, and got acetylsalicylic acid, and eventually Bayer managed to purify and manufacture it at scale and start selling it as Aspirin once they'd fed it to people and determined it worked as a painkiller.

    It's a pretty standard 1800s try extracting compounds from herbal remedies, then kill some people with them, then apply basic chemical reactions to create novel compounds, then get lucky and produce a real medicine story. It doesn't happen anymore because we've run out of things to try and you can't just create new compounds and feed them to people and see what happens anymore - you've got to demonstrate that there's a plausible mode of action against a specific condition before starting human trials.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    the only valid alternative medicine is animal therapy, it's fucking wild that we aren't prescribing kitten baths (that is, laying on the floor and having 50 kittens poured out of a basket onto you) as step #2 for everyone who isn't allergic.

    like yeah it's not gonna cure cancer (i mean who knows, imagine if it turns out it does lmao) but gods does it make it easier to bear with things

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Careful, this might get you sued in Germany.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago

    Found RFK Jr's account.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Not homeopathy but I once saw a video where someone tried to use quantum physics to justify manifesting. Grifters gonna grift.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Meanwhile none of these people know what a probability field is, much less what the fuck makes a baryon anti-green.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I highly recommend everyone to read up on Feynman, he is absolutely one of the genius that you can read about for modern times (well probably Hawking too). He gave me the urge to understand calculus and even if I never got there (I will probably try till I die because I wish I understood the world in a similar way), I so wish I could understand it 1/10 of he did. Also the biographies and other stories show how much he loves what he did, if we only could have many more with such interest in science. Mean maybe we do I don't read science journals but his drive I think shows a lot.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Anyone who wins a Nobel in physics by watching people in a cafeteria is worth llistneing to.

    There are some interviews in YT with him. I like the one where he tells the interviewer if he wants to stump a physicists ask them how ice skates work.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    The supposed science behind homeopathy was already known, though. It was never a mystery.

    It basically worked around the pseudoscientific principle that water remembered what used to be in it, so if you diluted out water concentrated with the thing you had, it would somehow "remember" what was in it, and when taken, would draw it from the body through some principle of magnetism.

    It's not like it magically somehow worked, and everyone was in amazement or anything quite like that. The only real reasons it did anything at all was that its contemporary treatments were things like bloodletting, which were worse for most things than not doing anything at all, or as a result of placebo.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Yeah know over the years I have gone from let the idiots be idiots when it comes to folks who believe pseudoscience, but I am now of the general opinion that it should be perfectly acceptable to throw them in front of a train.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Yeah know over the years I have gone from let the idiots be idiots

    The problem is they take over the world, they end up in the positions of power etc. How to contain that, short of derision I'm not sure and even derision often doesnt work, some wear their stupidity as a badge of achievement!

    It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.” - Franz Kafka

    The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. - Bertrand Russell

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Absolutely also doesn't help that they can now communicate over the internet, which means every person who has the potential to be the village idiot almost inevitably becomes one.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    To add to your point, it used to be that the village idiot was just that, known for it, and shamed or shunned. Now that they can connect to other village idiots, they can find a community of like minded idiots that reinforces their beliefs.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    They should be fine anyhow if homeopathy really works. They just need to take a little train material, serially dilute it to 10⁻²⁰ strength, then take it with sugar pills. Train immunity!

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Are you telling me that I should have diluted some bullet material, instead of trying to start by shooting myself with a small caliber and work up my immunity from that? All this work, wasted!

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    "You are simultaneously healthy and dying of cancer. We just need only observe you when you're healthy."

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Hugh Everett understood quantum mechanics.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Do you understand how your car works, every single aspect? No? Do you know how to use your car?

    Those are separate things. Yes, there's overlap but you say because you don't understand how it works, doesn't mean you don't know how to use it.

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