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Sponsored by the Wellcome Trust | |  |  |     | 
|  |  | | (This debate is closed and is a read-only archive.) | | CAM has been tested in the real world
[22-Jun-2005]
| Mark Henderson champions 'the randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial', and argues that ' all drugs and procedures are equal'. Many mainstream drugs are in fact derived from plants, and are modified mostly to gain patent protection, in order to divert the lucrative flow of currency towards the already powerful drug companies.
| Henderson's statements are misguided at best, and misleading at worst. I take exception to his contribution to this spiked-debate. He would have us believe that allopathic medicine holds all the cards. It does not. But it does hold all the funding for the trials he speaks of, and the research that's required in order to produce the drugs to be tested.
| What drug company would be interested in doing a randomised trial on stinging nettle tea? The randomised trials that Henderson refers to are put in place by the drug companies in order to release often dangerous drugs onto the marketplace, with less than 2-3 per cent biased efficacy. These same drugs are often removed from our shelves after the market has been flooded with them, and after the real side-effects from the real-life study - conducted on unwitting people, who are often suffering from serious health problems.
| In the real world, we see the real results - not the dubious, manipulated statistical results of some drug company's biased funding. But these real-time results are often buried, along with the real-time corpses that these dangerous products deliver to the patients and families, until it becomes blatantly obvious that there's something seriously wrong.
| How then, if Henderson's randomised trial is so efficient, do these toxic chemicals end up in the veins and guts of people and animals - only to be removed from the shelves, when the true nature of their harmful effects is felt by the general public?
| Complementary supplements, on the other hand, have been tested in the real world for countless generations, and have been proven safe in the groups of people who have used them over countless generations. There are no skeletons hiding in the complementary food supplements cupboards.
| If you honestly believe that plant derivatives can't be used to alleviate health problems, then next time you get acid indigestion, try leaving the salt-packed Gaviscon alone and sip a cup of peppermint tea instead. Not only does peppermint tea ease the immediate acid problems, but if taken regularly over several weeks, one tends to forget what the acid indigestion feels like.
| Perhaps a double-blind study would show that peppermint tea surpasses Gaviscon and the multi billion dollar stomach acid indigestion industry. But can you really see peppermint being treated in the same manor that these drugs are funded?
| Andrew K Fletcher, UK
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