- Compared to traditional medicines used by us for thousands of years, synthetics have only 150 years of human use history – a tiny fraction. However, being made from toxic petroleum, they are inherently toxic and the scientific tests (in vitro, in vivo, in small animals, etc.) are meant to see how toxic they are before subjecting them to clinical trials in humans;
- Petrochemicals are not the same as plant and animal substances our ancestors tested over countless generations to learn what was edible or medicinal. Many of them people died during that process. Yet some argue that because petroleum is natural, chemicals derived from it are therefore not toxic. I am not aware of any ancestral tradition based on people safely consuming petroleum and passing down that experience.
- Few, if any, of us have also addressed the issue of purity of synthetic drugs. World pharmacopoeias usually list up to a few %. But even 1% of an impurity in synthetics can spell serious trouble if that chemical is particularly strong-acting or highly toxic. For example, if 1% of LSD is added to psilocybin, a normal dose of the latter containing the LSD would make its psychedelic effects double because LSD is up to 200x stronger acting than psilocybin. Regardless, how many studies of synthetic psilocybin over the past 25 years had unknown strong-acting or toxic impurities therein without the researchers’ knowledge? These would have obviously distorted our research data. How much of our research literature over the past several decades was based on unsure test objects (drugs), meaning useless resulting data? Plenty! Because I have encountered this quite often myself.
- Antibiotics (penicillin), steroids (testosterone & cortisone), and opioids (morphine, heroin & fentanyl) are some of the most useful and then abused drugs we have. The fields have turned from a few life savers to increasingly more new drugs being abused along with new diseases that require more new drugs to treat, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle (VC). And treating drug abuse is itself a booming industry!
- No one mentions that our modern drug-therapy process with synthetics is not scientific. Its initial testing on in vitro and in vivo cell systems is scientific, so may be in animals with limited life span (whose results cannot be directly translated to humans). Then, when clinical trials are done on humans for increasingly shorter time before approval, we still have to go through the trial-and-error process in patients – the same process used by our ancient ancestors thousands of years ago. So, our modern drug development and testing process is not complete (lacking science and/or human wisdom) without using the trial-and-error step along with its essential time element – millennia, not just a generation or two.
Dedicated to safe and effective natural therapeutics