Oh, you thought that the crappy teaching collection was an accident? Well, probably it was, but malign neglect is a major problem, especially when the teacher hates getting stuck teaching that class again. Another big problem is the standard western good/evil, industrial/alternative dichotomy, however matched. It's more complex than that.
St. John's wort, for example, does interact with a lot of things on the list (I use Drugs.com to check interactions, incidentally, and I recommend it). if you drill down (e.g. use the professional-level information, not the consumer), what you often find is that the drug in question was found to have an interaction with another drug in the same class (statins, for example), in some people, in one study (or ideally some studies). Therefore, the recommendation is that ALL patients taking that drug avoid ALL drugs in the interaction class, just in case.
Again, this doesn't mean that you should ignore the warning. But you need to understand it. That's what I mean by nuance.
An example of lack of nuance is the general warning to avoid grapefruit if you're on statins. It turns out that rosuvastatin actually doesn't interact with grapefruit, but it's odd enough that, unless you check, you generalize the "no grapefruit with statins" rule unnecessarily.
That said, I'm always leery of herbal preps, especially those made from wild plants, and those made in America, China, and other places with lax regulations about content and quality. That's one huge advantage of the drug industry: you're supposed to know what you're getting pretty exactly. With wild plants, there's this thing called genetic variation. It interacts in fascinating ways with growing conditions, including "terroir." These further interact with collecting conditions--did the collector pick the appropriate part, like the new leaves, or bulldoze the plant, put it in trash bags, and chop it up days latter when it was starting to mildew? (as in some white sage smudges). Then there's the herbal prep (tincture, pill, whatever). What's the QA/QC on that? Do they know what went into the medicine? A lot of early research on Echinacea is crap because the natural products chemists couldn't be bothered to learn that there's more than one species of Echinacea, and they didn't make sure they had the right plant or voucher their collections so someone could go back and identify what they used.
And so on. Herbs can work wonders. Industrial medicines can work wonders a bit more predictably. I think there's a place for both, but (opinionated skunk that I am), I don't think there's a place for being stupid with either. Which I hope we can all agree on.
]]>Of the drugs I have looked at the advice sheets for, a very large number say that there are potentially nasty interactions with St John's Wort - more than for any other substance or drug, including alcohol. Yes, it's a useful drug, but it doesn't play nicely with many other drugs - which is ALL that I said.
]]>It's quite enlightening.
It's also important. I'm on a drug with 496 interactions listed. The drug is in a class of drugs that affect an important enzyme, so everything that interacts with said enzyme is affected. This isn't quite true, because it turns out there are two forms of this enzyme in human bodies. Most of the research on this enzyme is on one form, but it turns out that the drug I'm on affects only the lesser-known form. As a result, most of the warnings for this drug are in the "abundance of caution" and might not apply. Or they might. So I do have to pay attention to what drugs I take and what foods I eat, but it turns out that a number of interactions that I was told to worry about actually don't happen for me.
From a bit of looking, the same seems true for St. John's Wort. Again, drugs.com actually gives you a summary of the evidence, as well as the consumer grade warning, so you can see if it's likely to be seriously dangerous to you or not before you take it.
]]>The fast decays of the nasty stuff like Sr-90 can be overcome by having plenty of it to start with. Decay is exponential, so some will be left for very long time. If only a few milligrams are enough to poison, I think "enough" will still be there.
My guess is that thousands of tonnes of mixed radioactive crap ejected from the Chernobyl reactor explosion was simply disposed off with the usual care and consideration that the USSR employed about everything else in general: Dumped somewhere in a trench, covered with dirt, no good records kept as a matter of principle. Because records gets people shot ín the USSR.
Diggers and dumper drivers are then dispersed to important new tasks in many different places far away, nobody hears that they all died "too soon", and the manager of the operation does get a bad cluster in their HR-statistics (and get shot).
Decades later a new bunch of suckers arrive to dig trenches in a perfectly chosen spot where the soil is nice and soft. They are huffing in all that pesky dust, making some open fires with radioactive wood, and maybe a lucky few finds "heating rocks" they can stick in their sleeping bags to warm their feet with?
Soldiers who know better and maybe questions any part of the operation, they get put down in records as a gobby, to be shot later when a boost to motivation and a display of leadership is required.
]]>I started off by pointing out that many herbal treatments were useful (and often at least as much as the synthetic replacements), but the potent ones needed considerable care, in dosage, length of use and interactions. I know damn well that's true of many synthetic drugs, too. At no point did I take the anti-herbal line; quite the converse.
]]>Fair enough. I'd still suggest reading drugs.com for the medicines you are on. This is speaking as someone who got caught in a weird interaction and went to the hospital with a problem that puzzled the doctors. Who is also the child and grandchild of people who've had messy drug interaction problems. Knowing more helps.
Read the science behind the warnings on your drugs. I'm not suggesting that you use St. John's Wort, because, quite honestly, that's better for younger Americans who don't have health insurance (speaking from experience).
Instead, the problem you face is that you're likely to get stuck taking more prescriptions for whatever. Knowing the science behind the interaction warnings for what you already take will almost certainly help you work with your doctor, even if the best answer you can get is "nobody's done that experiment, so good luck figuring it out."
]]>I'm sure this is especially acute with writing, where so much of how it works involves being alone with your thoughts for periods of time. But it seems to apply with things that require focused thinking in general. I'm not saying I've never struggled with the tedious details of complex problems, but it seems a little harder to keep a clear head with such things when that head is also full of vicarious human misery and horror.
]]>Why? Because some overly-enthusiastic TA had done a metallic sodium + water demonstration that had gotten out of control a couple of years before. Also, metallic sodium (and other related elements in the first column of the periodic table) were banned from all labs occupied by undergraduates.
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