Never heard of phenylephrine but we have shit over in Europe too that does fuck-all, like that "homeopathic" bullcrap. Last time i went to visit my grandma i happened to have a cold and she immediately tried giving me some stuff called "oscillococcinum". I got suspicious when i looked over the packaging so i looked it up, and turns out it's basically nothing but sugar claiming to be imbued with some magic properties thanks to "trace" (read ZERO) amounts of something or other.
Pisses me the fuck off...they advertise the shit out of it on TV and they get gullible old people to waste their money. And their pensions are already meager in eastern Europe, they don't need to be scammed out of their money with placebo pills. Tried to convince my grandma to stop buying the stuff but i think all i managed to do was make her mad at me :(
Homeopathic stuff is even worse than this, beyond being useless, it's just NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY should not be allowed to exist.
The problem with phenylephrine here, is that it is an Actual Drug that does Actual Things, just not remotely the thing it claims to do. Due to a widespread attempt to ban pseudoephedrine because meth, something needed to fill that gap as the "safe" decongestant. Industry put forward phenylephrine, a vasoconstrictor commonly uses in topical applications, forced it through government approval because regulatory capture, then police and political forces used its existence to justify bans on pseudoephedrine. Something that worked great was made illegal/hard to obtain (talk to a pharmacist, scan a card, only a week of pills at a time; if not explicitly banned), but industry still got their precious dollars.
The German health minister finally had the nerve to suggest that health insurance should stop paying for homeopathic remedies (because it's a two hundred year old grift) and people got really upset.
Because people don't trust the pharmaceutical industry. Whether they're right to is a different conversation but the starting point is that they just don't.
edit: I'm more awake now and can make a full point lol. Basically the way we combat homeopathy and other unscientific medical practices is not solely through education but with trust and access. People need to be able to trust pharma. Education means knowing that the pharma pill you're taking is going to fix your arteries. Trust is that you know it's going to do only that and you're not gonna suffer from a stroke in 5 years because of that one time you had to take it.
The second component is access. Homeopathic remedies might not be the cheapest out there (depends where you get them) but they also promise to fix everything with no side effects (obviously since they don't contain any medication). It's kind of a good deal then.
People look at the pill bottle and they don't think "I need this to survive" they think "oh shit here we go again". When they look at the homeopathic pill they think "nice, I get to take this". But I don't think it's a psychological thing as much as it's simply the pharma industry destroying its own reputation in the chase of profits. You can't really trust anything Bayer says after they knowingly distributed HIV-infected blood bags. Even if they invented panacea nobody would trust them.
As we know, capital co-opts everything, especially criticisms of capital.
Homeopathy went out of favour once germ theory was established. From what I gather it was more or less dormant for a hundred years, then came back with the 1960s/70s counterculture movement and scepticism of modern pharmaceuticals. From then on it was turned into a huge (grift) industry of its own.
Germans also love anthroposophic remedies, which originated from a guy who would have been a Nazi had he only lived a bit longer.
Never heard of phenylephrine but we have shit over in Europe too that does fuck-all, like that "homeopathic" bullcrap. Last time i went to visit my grandma i happened to have a cold and she immediately tried giving me some stuff called "oscillococcinum". I got suspicious when i looked over the packaging so i looked it up, and turns out it's basically nothing but sugar claiming to be imbued with some magic properties thanks to "trace" (read ZERO) amounts of something or other.
Pisses me the fuck off...they advertise the shit out of it on TV and they get gullible old people to waste their money. And their pensions are already meager in eastern Europe, they don't need to be scammed out of their money with placebo pills. Tried to convince my grandma to stop buying the stuff but i think all i managed to do was make her mad at me :(
Homeopathic stuff is even worse than this, beyond being useless, it's just NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY should not be allowed to exist.
The problem with phenylephrine here, is that it is an Actual Drug that does Actual Things, just not remotely the thing it claims to do. Due to a widespread attempt to ban pseudoephedrine because meth, something needed to fill that gap as the "safe" decongestant. Industry put forward phenylephrine, a vasoconstrictor commonly uses in topical applications, forced it through government approval because regulatory capture, then police and political forces used its existence to justify bans on pseudoephedrine. Something that worked great was made illegal/hard to obtain (talk to a pharmacist, scan a card, only a week of pills at a time; if not explicitly banned), but industry still got their precious dollars.
The German health minister finally had the nerve to suggest that health insurance should stop paying for homeopathic remedies (because it's a two hundred year old grift) and people got really upset.
Insanity. How is this scam still a thing in the 21st century?!
Because people don't trust the pharmaceutical industry. Whether they're right to is a different conversation but the starting point is that they just don't.
edit: I'm more awake now and can make a full point lol. Basically the way we combat homeopathy and other unscientific medical practices is not solely through education but with trust and access. People need to be able to trust pharma. Education means knowing that the pharma pill you're taking is going to fix your arteries. Trust is that you know it's going to do only that and you're not gonna suffer from a stroke in 5 years because of that one time you had to take it.
The second component is access. Homeopathic remedies might not be the cheapest out there (depends where you get them) but they also promise to fix everything with no side effects (obviously since they don't contain any medication). It's kind of a good deal then.
People look at the pill bottle and they don't think "I need this to survive" they think "oh shit here we go again". When they look at the homeopathic pill they think "nice, I get to take this". But I don't think it's a psychological thing as much as it's simply the pharma industry destroying its own reputation in the chase of profits. You can't really trust anything Bayer says after they knowingly distributed HIV-infected blood bags. Even if they invented panacea nobody would trust them.
As we know, capital co-opts everything, especially criticisms of capital.
Homeopathy went out of favour once germ theory was established. From what I gather it was more or less dormant for a hundred years, then came back with the 1960s/70s counterculture movement and scepticism of modern pharmaceuticals. From then on it was turned into a huge (grift) industry of its own.
Germans also love anthroposophic remedies, which originated from a guy who would have been a Nazi had he only lived a bit longer.