I don't think point and sputter posts like this are very useful. How is this example more surprising than any other quack medicine example? How much understanding does the typical patient have of any medicine? Lots of medicines are controlled doses of poisons.
I think you are mistaken about the lethality. It would be surprising if it "often" killed its users, yet was able to spread. But that's not true. Yes, it is sold at industrial concentrations, but most people follow the directions and dilute it. The FSA says that, used as directed, it will only cause GI distress (though the FDA suggests that the low blood pressure could be fatal). Users are warned of the effects ahead of time. That probably reassures them that it is working, that they haven't been scammed with an inactive substance.
What is the death rate? The Seattle case appears to involve 200 users and no fatalities. The woman who died in Vanuatu appears to be the only known death, but I don't think much is known about the hundred thousand malaria victims in East Africa who took it.
I don't think this demonstrates human stupidity any more than any other quack medicine example. It does nicely illustrate Poe's law. Tha...
"Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong." —http://xkcd.com/971/
It's industrial-strength bleach.
It is consumed diluted (I think the vendors suggest to mix it with lemon juice or so) and only few droplets a day, so it's not that bad as drinking industrial-strength bleach. (There is certain threshold of strength above which the evidence overcomes even the crackpots' natural immunity. Death or immediately noticeable health problems tend to be above the threshold. There are naturally people who ignore all suggestions and take the stuff in concentrated form, but I suppose they don't stay in the pool of MMS proponents too long.)
Actually I don't think MMS is sillier than homoeopathy - although sodium chlorite is a poison, poisons in small concentrations are used in medicine and it has at least a chance of producing some effect, which can't be said about distilled water.
I have discussed - over the internet - with a person who claimed to be cured from various diseases by MMS, and was very indignant when I said it doesn't work.
assuming symmetry and some relation to a linear component of your utility fuction, and so on...
It's industrial-strength bleach. Literally just bleach. Usually drunk, sometimes injected, and yes, it often kills you. It is every bit as bad as it sounds if not worse.
Apparently it's quite diluted and taken in very low doses, so it's not like you are advised to drink a glass of bleach. It's also less corrosive than chlorine and superior for the control of legionella bacteria, when used for water disinfection and purification. Whether it kills cancer without killing the patient first has apparently not been tested.
A lot of chemo drugs are toxic, aren't they? I'm actually not sure how they were located as hypotheses. Does anyone have info on this?
A lot of chemo drugs are toxic, aren't they? I'm actually not sure how they were located as hypotheses. Does anyone have info on this?
This is discussed to some extent in Siddhartha Mukherjee's "The Emperor of All Maladies" which is an excellent book about the history of cancer. In most cases, chemo drugs are chosen because they target a specific phenomenon that is occurring in cancer cells more commonly than it is occurring in other cells. The most common example is mitosis (since the main problem with cancer cells is that they just keep growing). This is why chemo drugs often harm cell types like immune cells and hair follicles- these cells are some of the few cells in the body that are often growing.
A historical example may be instructive. One of the first attempts at chemo was for leukemia. It was known that leukemia cells had strange mitosis behavior and distorted nuclei. So researchers tried giving folic acid to the patients since this was known to be important in cell dvision. Unfortunately, this made the leukemia even more virulent: it turned out that levels of folic acid were actually a limiting factor on how fast the cancer cells could divide. So then they tried giving them chemicals that interfered with the metabolism and processing of folic acid. This was the first set of chemo drugs that had any success (although it turned out to be always temporary: the cancer almost inevitably evolved around it).
Hormesis might be relevant here. I don't see a compelling reason to believe these people are not being helped in some cases. This isn't homeopathy-level crazy. And let's not forget to do the utilitarian homework: one case of cancer remission (or any other serious condition) is worth a substantial number of mild digestive discomfort.
It also isn't religion-level crazy, since it is empirically testable (actually rather trivial to test as these things go!), and controlled studies could probably change most of these people's minds on it. Knee-jerk appeals to d...
Another angle on this is that it isn't about humans in general, it's about some of the most gullible humans.
That aspect of things became salient to me when I read a man complaining about the women who get involved with prisoners-- even those who have been convicted for murder. It's so unfair when some ordinary guys get no female attention at all. I suddenly realized that he was talking about a very small proportion of women. The vast majority of women aren't chasing prisoners.
Tolkien's Sindarin (and, IIRC, Welsh) have two plurals, one for more than one and...
I showed this to my friend who is a chemistry student. He said bleach is sodium hypochlorite, and this is sodium chlorite.
To be fair, it technically cures any number of ailments as well as modern medicine: You die of something other than the treated disease.
But if your standard for effective treatment is "Died of something other than the disease", there are easier ways to reach that goal.
There are two things going wrong here. The first problem is failing to call things by their true names. This is a widespread problem when people use drugs and supplements: they refer to them by slang terms or brand names. This cuts them off from information; if they knew it was bleach, they'd think twice before using it. There was a similar problem with "bath salts" (a term that does not identify a drug, but rather means "unidentified substance that's labeled as maybe poison".)
The second problem is failing to observe the first level of ...
When I read the title I thought you'd be presenting us with an ad for a fake snake oil cure, mocking alternative medicine. The truth is far more horrifying than fiction.
What I don't understand is how this got into the market in the first place. Don't they have to pass regulations first? Or was he making it in his basement like a meth cook? Now I think most alternative medicine is over-priced placebo for gullible rich twits, but this crosses the line. I have to commend Rhys Morgan for exposing this consumer hazard. At the age of 17, he's already done much more than most will ever do. He'll make a fine addition to the skeptic community.
Others have covered your knee jerk poison-is-bad reaction so I'll let that pass, but the thing that stuck out for me as bad epistemic standards from MMS proponents was seeing some "explanation" for why it would give you an upset stomach despite the other claim that it would only harm "bad" bacteria. Something about how it's your body flushing out poisons and it's a good sign. It struck me as an untested rationalisation someone just made up.
My initial reaction was "I wish I wouldn't have known about this", because it made me physically shuddered. After the shock and disgust, I forced myself to accept the proposition "There is a company selling bleach as medicine, and people are ingesting it". I am now happy I have seen this, because my model of the world is more accurate, and if I act on my values in accordance with more accurate beliefs, I will be able to do more good.
My brain is still not pessimistic enough about human stupidity.
I'm pretty sure we have a cure for that. It involves spending time on certain sites...
It's industrial-strength bleach. Literally just bleach. Usually drunk, sometimes injected, and yes, it often kills you. It is every bit as bad as it sounds if not worse.
Industrial strength bleach? Not even diluted? Sometimes injected? But that's a go to method for a cruel and painful but fairly quick way to murder someone!
My brain is still not pessimistic enough about human stupidity.
Likewise. In fact there aren't many people I would have believed at face value if they had told me this was actually a thing people do.
Calling something one thing versus another doesn't alter the reality being described. However, choice of nomenclature does affect how people tend to think about things, and I think does take its toll on discourse over time, by creating pockets of cognitive dissonance and subtle miscommunication.
The fact that not only a term like "preventative medicine" but also a word which literally means "like the disease" don't instantly generate mental pointers to vaccines as an obvious and superb positive example of both of these things, seems like a pretty good illustration of words having gone horribly wrong. (Incidentally, vaccines do in some cases cure existing conditions, e.g. rabies.)
Vaccines function by well understood mechanisms that stand in sharp contrast to the magic water kind of homeopathy. That's the whole point as to why I would consider vaccines a stronger example for the darned word (it being an etymologically generic sounding word which aptly describes the notion that -- in at least some cases -- "what has the best chance of curing the disease is something that resembles the disease"). Permitting an etymologically unrelated meaning to become the primary definition, especially if that is a valueless and silly thing, is linguofiscally irresponsible. Latin roots don't grow on trees (well, perhaps they sort of do, but my point is that there are costs to this sort of thing).
Debunking "homeopathy" in a way that respects the idea of the word being synonymous with Hahnemann's magic water is an unnecessarily weak approach. To defeat an argument you ought to use the strongest face-value interpretation, not just the one you think the other person probably means by it (or even what the history books say they mean by it). Start by saying "your so-called homeopathy isn't even a consistent concept, otherwise you guys would be championing vaccines". Complain about the use of a word to mean an unrelated concept. Then move on to disprove the magic water hypothesis with a different (mutually acceptable) word being applied like "dilutive persistence" or some such thing.
This is an interesting set of points which I'll need to think more about. My immediate reaction is that a) you overestimate the level to which the vast majority of people are actually influenced at all by the roots of the words they hear. b) The statement about the rabies vaccine isn't really accurate- it doesn't cure rabies. If you actually get serious symptoms the vaccine is essentially close to useless. The vaccine is given to people after they have been bitten because the immunity it induces can often be enough before the virus has had a large chance t...
We can always use more case studies of insanity that aren't religion, right?
Well, Miracle Mineral Supplement is my new go-to example for Bad Things happening to people with low epistemic standards. "MMS" is a supposed cure for everything ranging from the common cold to HIV to cancer. I just saw it recommended in another Facebook thread to someone who was worried about malaria symptoms.
It's industrial-strength bleach. Literally just bleach. Usually drunk, sometimes injected, and yes, it often kills you. It is every bit as bad as it sounds if not worse.
This is beyond Poe's Law. Medieval blood draining via leeches was far more of an excusable error than this, they had far less evidence it was a bad idea. I think if I was trying to guess what was the dumbest alternative medicine on the planet, I still would not have guessed this low. My brain is still not pessimistic enough about human stupidity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement