I've been an RN for almost 20 years.

[MrMickeysMom]

236. K&R… I've been an RT 39 years, and work around some excellent researchers...

I respect them because I've seen so much in my almost 40 years of respiratory care. In fact, I've taken education modules just in case I decide to move from the diagnostic end of health care to research.

I found myself catching up on all this flavor of the week bantering on "woo". Sometimes you just have to stop a moment and realize, like Texasgal says, that natural things do work. We just haven't quantified the safety and efficacy all treatment to be used for disease states.

We are supposed to leave that up to research, but, unless you're big pharma, NIH grants seems to dish out less and less of the Lion's share of funding each year.

I find it interesting the speed at which all the dollars from pharma results in more and more drugs getting released to treat conditions that ARE affected by other things. For example, prevention measures like exercise, or meditation, which this article addresses:
http://www.yogameditation.com/Articles/Issues-of-Bindu/Bindu-11/Pictures-of-the-brain-s-activity-during-Yoga-Nidra

It also pisses me off to think there is bias and conflict of interest in some big pharmaceutical companies expecting good outcomes of their drugs, only to be released so soon, many are withdrawn because of the poor outcome.

We don't research everything that is a treatment, and we should. And we seem to have no end to treatment in the form of pharmaceuticals.

Personally, I'd rather opt for observing groups of people who stay healthy without drugs and then do research on them, but the FDA and United States Congress don't exactly align with the best outcome to health. If they did, they'd reimburse studies that take a long time. This would certainly include longitudinal studies of exercise.