Anybody take "woo" products anyway

[moriah]

35. I worked in a health food store, there's "woo" and there's "REALLY woo".

REALLY woo is homeopathy, reiki, etc.

Standard woo is buying pills because they say "Joint Pain Relief" on them, vs having any idea how chondriton, glucosamine, and/or MSM actually work.

Borderline naturopathy is going by the German Commission E Monographs and choosing individual formulations or cocktails that have proven uses, or making things from old pharmacopoeias.

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FWIW, when we were iced in for three weeks in the mountains (doctor already 45 minutes away in normal conditions, the roads were impassable) and lost heat, I caught what my doctor later said from my chest x-ray had to have been pneumonia (it was mostly cured by the time I got there, though I went ahead and did a course of real antibiotics). We had no antibiotics on the mountain, but we did have two homemade herbal preparations.

The first was usnea lichen that had been wildcrafted (picked off the trees it grows on), tinctured in alcohol, and aged a year. Usnea is a potent antibiotic against staph and strep. I stayed pretty drunk for awhile, because they were waking me up to give me a shot of this moss/fire water combo every two hours. The second was more dangerous -- lobelia seed tinctured in apple cider vinegar. Too much can cause heart arrythmias or intense vomiting. They would wake me up when I was really fevered by wetting a fingertip with the vinegar and putting a drop or two on my lips. I would lick it, and it caused an expectorant reaction. I coughed up a ton of mucous, made more liquid by the action of the lobelia on the mucous secretion glands. Then they'd give me the shot of alcoholic antibiotics, and I'd go back to bed.

Not that I'd recommend using naturopathy to treat something as serious as pneumonia if you had ANY other options.