Back once more - news and herbal medicine

Hey there guys,
so i've been busy writing for various websites (find links to all my publications in my new blog here: http://dilarus-journalism.blogspot.com/ please bookmark it) so i've somewhat neglected my blog as of late, im gonna make more of an effort to update it regular and keep you all updated.

For the most part, working for fusion gamer and hookedgamers has been fun. The guys at fusion send me the occasional game to review, which i love and the guys at hookedgamers want me to source my own games which i have no idea how to do and because i don't have access to my hookedgamers email address i doubt will be very fruitful. So one is going better than the other, due to my ongoing unemployment i am still unable to buy games to write about. Happily, fusion gamer encourages me to write retrospectives about my favorite old games and pastes them on the front page for all to see so i can busy myself with that.

Now, onto the main point of this blog post. Oddly, what i want to write about now is not game-related but a common sense piece. So here's some facts about herbal medicine.

Herbal/Natural Medicine.

People may not know that 99% of all medicine started out as herbal medicine (the rest have been created in labs only recently). For thousands of years humans have sought out and collected plants, roots and other ingredients to make salves and balms, soups and potions to fight various illnesses. Fighting fever, dulling pain, aiding sleep or driving out demons, some of the remedies we came up with worked, others not so well.

Let me take you back

One common cure for most fevers was the flobotomy or blood-letting, where doctors would cut an artery to drain blood from the patient. Oddly, the loss of blood would reduce the patient's blood pressure and would actually result in sedation and the patient's fever would go down simply due to less blood going to the extremities and skin. It was due to the fact a flobotomy could easily lead to death from blood loss that some people believe doctors turned to leeches, which drained a set amount of blood from a patient without risking the severing of an artery. The leeches, when full would seal up the wound they made and wouldn't leave a scar, nifty little critters.

One other famous procedure was trepanning, where holes would be made in a patient's skull with sharp stones to let demons out back in "caveman" days, later still performed to relieve headaches, believably caused by a build-up of pressure in the head. Doctors would clamp the patient's head and scrape the scalp off, then proceed to bore holes with metal instruments. Death was almost certain, not usually from the procedure, but due to deadly infections from open wounds as doctors were not yet aware of microorganisms and the need to be hygienic.

Now, if you're like me, you're glad these practises died out, we now understand a great deal about the human body, what causes and cures a wide variety of ailments and due to a huge leap of technological advancement can create medicines that work much better than chewing roots and applying frog intestines to the forehead.

Now here's the real important part. Hippocrates wrote in the 5th century BC about a powder gathered from the bark of the willow tree that could help dull pain and reduce a fever, we found out he was indeed correct, and referring to salicylic acid, a compount that has analgesic (pain killing) and anti-inflammatory properties useful in fighting pains and fever. A very useful discovery and a great representation of early medicine.

There was one downside to salicylic acid though: when taken in a dose high enough to be truly effective, it caused the stomach and intestines to bleed. Death was also common from overdose in its early application, as nobody could predict the effects of it on children or the elderly as prescribed doses were not made by informed experts. Many years later (in the 19th century) a group of german scientists succeeded in isolating salicylic acid and set out to tackle the problem of internal bleeding.

After many years of altering various chains of the compound, they eventually succeeded in creating a substance called acetylsalicylic acid otherwise known as ASPIRIN (you may have heard of it). Aspirin keeps the useful qualities of salicylic acid but without the dangerous side-effects (you can still overdose on it, but you can overdose on oxygen too). Now, this is a brilliant example of natural medicine versus medicine (as we call it) Doctors and scientists, people will brilliant minds have worked tirelessly throughout the centuries to look at each and every example of natural herbal medicine and separate the useful and the useless (ground rhinoceros horn doesn't reduce a fever, you may be shocked to find out).

People who have dedicated their lives to saving people's lives, working day after day to advance the cause of medicine have helped to create the medicines we now use, don't simply dismiss their research and instead choose herbal medicine because it's "natural", we can prove they are less effective (if at all) and often have more side-effects than their laboratory-made counterparts.

I cannot begin to describe how stupid people are to choose not to have anaesthetic when giving birth, to choose ginseng when they're stressed or to have a hot cup of lemongrass tea rather than see a dentist for crippling dental pain. These people are afraid of what they don't understand and are wrong to push their ill-informed beliefs onto those they love. The same goes for "organic" food and *choke* religion. If you're put off of a certain cure because of honest testimony from someone you know who has had a bad experience with it or has suffered side effects, fair enough, but remember there are often a variety of cures available for any given ailment (for a headache alone, if you cannot take aspirin, you can try paracetamol or ibuprofen).

I myself am allergic to penicillin, but that is not the medicine's FAULT, nor is it science's, it is a genetic disposition i have. When i had a terrible infection in my throat, i could not take penicillin to cure it, but that doesn't mean i turned to herbal medicine! I instead took a course of another antibiotic: amoxycillin. i was not allergic to it (which we knew beforehand as scientists actually do their research) and the infection went away with no ill effects.

So please, if you have a problem talk to your doctor. You may not realize it, but doctors and scientists are SMARTER THAN YOU and may actually know what they're doing, together man has spent millions of hours and countless amounts of money to bring you medicine that is effective and safe, don't dismiss their hard work and instead take a herbal medicine people have been using since the dark ages because someone you know had a tummy ache after recieving treatment.

I have a great deal of faith in medicine, i'm asthmatic and its a fact that i wouldnt be alive today if scientists hadn't developed treatment for when i had asthma attacks and had to be taken to hospital when i was young. There is no way herbal medicine could have saved me, the only way to treat an asthma attack is to apply steroids directly to the lungs, something tree bark and hot water sadly cannot achieve.

So i implore you. Stay away from herbal medicine, if you get stabbed you'd live longer by going to the emergency room than to the herbal medicine counter at your local supermarket, You'd also feel better with morphine than with st. john's wort.

medicine isnt perfect, yes it may sometimes have a side-effect or two, but that's the price you pay for ridding yourself of a horrible debilitating illness. Trust me, it's the lesser of two evils, the herbal cure for polio involves charred donkey penis, and it very rarely works.