Homeopathy

true. i worked this out. you worked this out, i hope that most people correct that kind of thing in their head.

Agreed, most people work this kind of thing out quite readily, but even when we do understand what is behind the title we can still have our views coloured by something as apparently unimportant and easily dismissed as a sensational headline without knowing we have had our views coloured - and I am not talking about those people whose credulity lets them be swayed by a headline. We all weight information more strongly when it appears early in a process, we show a preference for early information, we suffer what is known as an irrational primacy effect which is what these kinds of sensational headlines tap into, the thing is you will not be aware that you have been effected by it or that it had coloured your further progression through the rest of the information.

Going off on a bit of a tangent here so I will stop.

i was trying to disprove my opinions on a dietry choice as being more healthy than another. and what i ended up with was confusinon and frustration at not seeming to get a clear answer. it is possible to check every source and every study to find the methods and etc etc but like i said as a lay person with no experience or real understanding (and yes a short fuse for trawling) dam i was none the wiser.

I can't imagine trying to find out the better option out of two dietary choices would be that difficult, using the right tools you should be able to get a decent idea pretty easily and fairly quickly ?

for me the links just kind of summed up my irritation, perhaps in a different way to how they irritated you.

Well to be honest it was the first one that set me off, looking into the author, the website in general and the preposterous nature of the article itself left me wondering how anyone could read something like that and take it as anything other than a stupid agenda driven article born out of pre-existing ideas.

why i asked again if we are overmedicated? for me it was less about the actual use of medication (in the first article) simply the link between numbers of (apparently unnecessary) deaths and where they occur - in the medical facility. loads of people die in hospitals and on the table of an O.R every year. and of course you dont know if a person would have died if they hadnt recieved the drug that caused the fatal reaction etc. but for me it was easy to link the overmedicated word into that set of numbers in a very loose sense. the interventiion of the medical community and the deaths caused by it = overmedication or thereabouts.

Again, I would hope to squeeze out of you a better or clearer idea of what you mean by overmedication, if you are using it to mean - in this context - any number of deaths in a medical facility that are not directly attributable to the condition the person was being treated for, I would still struggle to label that overmedication as all medication carries a risk, that someone dies from a poor reaction does not mean that they were overmedicated.

I could kill my big brother with a brazil nut (and many other people with nut allergies), but similarly he could not be said to have died from overeating.

Also the idea that these deaths are unnecessary might not be as clear cut as that, I could argue (and this is only to make the point) that when taken on the level of the medical facility and not the individual they are entirely necessary, any medical intervention carries a risk, that risk, however small, is averaged out across all the patients who fit into our category (those needing medical intervention that carries a risk) - as is the success of the medical intervention, we cannot have perfect cross-patient medical intervention as the nature of the situation inherently carries some risk, we cannot (at present) separate the success from the risk, they are part of the same process, so to remove risk is to remove medical intervention, we can scale back the risk or even negate that risk entirely by scaling back medical interventions or stopping them entirely.

But of course we wouldn't want to do that as medical intervention does vastly more good than harm, so to intervene we must necessarily expose people to the risk, we must necessarily place people at the risk of dieing from the interventions (and of course, some do) . Probably a good analogy would be a vaccine, like all medical intervention it carries a risk, so although we shouldn't be indifferent to the deaths of a few people from a poor reaction to a certain vaccine (and we should always strive to minimise this through improvement of the vaccine's safety profile) we just have to remember that without the vaccine there would be vastly more deaths.

the one about false research findings, i admit i stopped reading fairly quickly. i dint understand it. and no i didnt post it to be relevant to the overmedicated talk. more to highlight my annoyance at not finding simple answers. and when you find answers there are always conflicts and counter arguments and then can you (i) even believe the answers? no. apparently not. and therein lies my frustration. unless you are only using google to do mm to inch or £ to $ conversions it seems like you have to do endless trawling to find answers. and then you find opposing ones. and you (i) just go, "fuck it. i cant be fucked woith the amount of shit on the internet, why do people who are paid to do research end up with different answers? why cant people just publish true accurate findings?" - rhetorical question.

Differing outcomes suggests the researchers are not themselves agreed on the issue yet, they have not yet found broad acceptance. I wouldn't wait around for complete agreement on anything, a general consensus is about the best you will get in science.

""fuck it. i cant be fucked woith the amount of shit on the internet"

This comes back to my instance on asking for a clear and detailed explanation of the hypothesis (we are overmedicated) - if we are putting the idea forward we should be able to test the idea, we should be able to falsify it or confirm it.

I think you would find it less frustrating on your Google safari if you knew what you were looking for, rather than the vague catch-all of 'overmedicated'. If you were looking for falling renal functionality (mapped across several decades) through drug burden as an indicator of overmedication - - then you could read the studies and literally come away with a 'yes' or 'no' answer to the questions are we 'overmedicated' (if you judge falling renal functionality to be a good indicator of overmedication) - without a structure, without a clear definition of what it is you are trying to establish you are just going to end up being exposed to opinion.

Without that definition 'overmedicated' becomes pretty much anything you want it to be, my gran having her medicines doubled is overmedication, my gran having her medicines halved is proof of overmedication, a man having a bad reaction to an anaesthetic in the dentists chair is overmedication, menopausal women being offered remedies is overmedication . . . and so on.

i listen to internet radio and some of the commercials on there are crazy, trying to get people to take drugs to lose weight telling people not to change their diet or lifestyle just take the drugs.

Are you sure, they actually say not to change your diet or your lifestyle and just take the drugs ?

Can you remember the name of the drug, the name of the company selling the drug, the manufacturer or anything like that ?

loosley, my idea of overmedicated is something like this..... when medicines are used or the medical community are involved in a drug/surgical proceedural way (possibly a made up word there), when there is alternatives that are more 'natural' and arguably safer with less sideffects.....

Can you give an example of an 'alternative' that is has a better safety profile, less side effects (and I am assuming comparable efficacy) to a commonly used drug - so I know the kind of thing you are talking about.

How are you using the word 'natural' in this context, and in what way is something being more 'natural' better ?

By this definition (overmedicated = using a drug when there are 'more natural' alternatives available). . . .

A -- if a tiny amount of an anticoagulant is given to a patient, say once every 10 years, this counts as overmedication ?
B -- if there is no 'natural' option for a particular drug it is still overmedication ?

If B is true then any drug use is overmedication, if B is false then we can inject large amounts of required drugs into a patient and it would not be overmedicating, while A would still be overmedicating.

?

my idea of overmedicated would also include something along the lines of...... when the accidental death o f a person is caused misrtakenly by a mistake/adverse reaction to drug etc etc when in the care of the medical community......

Excuse the ridiculous hypothetical example but . . . .

A 32 year old man is brought into A&E, he has been in a road traffic accident, he has never in his life so much as taken an aspirin, but when he is given something to ease the pain he reacts badly and dies - would you say that he has been overmedicated - let's say he was given half a paracetamol ?

If this is a definition of overmedicated you recognise then there are plenty of examples of overmedication out there - and if I were to agree (seeing as some people do react badly to certain medicines) that we are overmedicated using this definition (essentially: adverse reactions = overmedication) then I would also have to return to my big brother's nuts (oooOOhhHHH!) and say that those who have died from a nut allergy were overeating.

yes i agree. the difference is that you appear to be more concerned about it than i do. you want things to be supported and proven, and im just happy to have idle beliefs on subjects that dont feel of particular consequense to me (despite my ramblings above).

Fair enough.