I’m relaxed, like I said, I find it hilarious. Keep it coming. And not that it matters, computer science major and math minor from U of M, graduated in 2009. But I could have majored in writing and it would make little to no difference in my ability to think critically and speak on these subjects. I’ve spend more time in extracurricular studies than anything in my formal education. And I don’t care what yours is.
Yeah, good one @RichVR…
Agreed. I do look back on my initial bait and I should have assumed people might have read my long post regardless of the bait. I could have left out nice try. But I’m still amazed that people can dish out so much but then can’t take someone saying, “nice try.” And timex feeling so insecure and hurt that he felt the need to say eat a bag of dicks. There are certainly some broken egos here. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of egoic retaliation as well.
Has it occurred to you that the use of such an obviously juvenile insult carried meaning in its very juvenility?
Feel free to reframe it however you’d like.
I like how that describes the functioning of this thread. A bunch of people repeating misinformation: “essential oils are complete bunk.” And there is clearly no research done before people make and repeat statements like these. Then you have people like @Timex who admit their ignorance on the subject and then proceed to speak authoritatively on the issue. Priceless.
Anytime you read an article like that and think only about how wrong your opposition is and how right you are, you are doing it wrong.
Yet again. Rein in the ego brodude. I know you’re not here to make friends. But still. We already know how superior you are. You’ve made that clear. Only trolls play the game you’re playing.
He’s like if Donald Trump used words over 2 syllables and could form coherent sentences. He’s also like my 2 year old who screams “I WIN!!!” over everything and anything.
Essential oils are mostly a waste of time and the manufacturers know it very well. In the US there is a certain portion of the public that is very vulnerable to the memetic pull of vitalism. Essential oils, like most naturopathic compounds, are one in a long line of these.
If one has produced a medication that actually works – and you can demonstrate that it works in a controlled clinical trial – it behooves one to put that claim before the FDA. Getting FDA approval on your medication is a license to print money.
If you don’t do this – then your product has to duel it out with all of the other naturopathic compounds on the shelf in the grocery store, pharmacy or naturopathic outlet. You don’t have any data so you’re forced to compete on price, packaging and direct to consumer marketing. That market is a dog eat dog market which is cruelly pyramidal in shape. There are a few huge winners standing on a pile of losers.
So, any product claiming some type of health benefit (regardless of the cute language in small print where it is not “intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any convention”) and doesn’t have FDA approval should cause a self-respecting skeptic to ask herself why wasn’t that item submitted as a medication for FDA approval?
The answer is, almost always, because the manufacturer knows full well that the compound in question wouldn’t pass muster.
It is very rare to find a medication that actually does what it says it ought to do. The overwhelming majority (90%+) of clinical trials of new medications end in FAILURE. Thus, any claims that a new medication causes some benefit should be greeted with skeptical scrutiny because most of the time those claims end up being not true. And that is the case for both naturopathic remedies or the latest tyrosine kinase inhibitor or monoclonal antibody from Big Pharma. Proving efficacy is hard because efficacious compounds are rare.
Natural remedies have been around for thousands of years. The improvement in human health in the last 100 years is due to the widespread recognition that almost all of these were worthless except for the few which were identified by the scientific method for actually being worth a damn. Show me a well designed clinical trial with a 1,000 subjects that show the benefit of an essential oil vs a placebo and you’ll be part of the way towards demonstrating something worthwhile. Uncontrolled studies with a few dozen participants proves nothing.
Computer science degree does not make you a scientist. That’s like saying you passed the real estate exam and that makes you qualifies to build homes. You’ve never done a day’s work of real life medical research and appear to suffer from the same disorder Trump does. You alluded several times that “you went to school for this” and it turns out you lied. Big surprise. You are the kind of worrying individual that would try to alter data to fit your theory to avoid having to say, “I was wrong you were right” (without conditional statements to save face or change the dialogue". I’d also like to point out you’ve moved goalposts around so much we can’t run 3 yards without smacking into one knocking ourselves unconscious.
At times it feels more like you’re doing an English dissertation with the research goal of analyzing what it takes to trick people into admitting a binary value of 0 equals 1. But like I said before, this is no game and people are dying and being destroyed due to old wife’s tales with most essential oils.
Claiming what I “only think about,” eh? No, I just read it and found it ironic that not only did it not describe what I was doing, it described quite accurately the way you and your friends repeat completely unsubstantiated statements in order to maintain your negative opinion of essential oils.
@RichVR, if you had read that post carefully you’d notice it’s not motivated by ego. I made the point that majors aren’t the only things people can speak on or that give someone credibility by providing the example of how I spent more time learning things outside of the my formal education than within it. When I told timex I didn’t care what his major was it was to make the point of how irrelevant the question was, not to insult him (despite his repeated and shamelessly juvenile insults).
@jpinard, I never said my major and minor were relevant to this topic, I was only answering timex’s irrelevant question. If I were a research scientist I obviously already would have made a point to say that–and I “implied” no such thing.
Arrendek made a condescending comment on how I should look up how science works because no one has the time to explain it to me. I said I only went to school for that purpose and that he should take his own advice. I was partially implying that I don’t have a bachelor’s degree in the arts, and that my education did expect me to learn “how science works,” but obviously not in the same depth whose field is organic chemistry, for instance. I also have work experience that taught me plenty about how human trial research studies for pharmaceuticals are carried out. I never claimed to be an expert in the field, only to think critically and have the knowledge enough to discern reliable studies from a bunch of talk–which has been the majority of the essential oil bashing here. So you say I lied and alluded “several times” that I went to school for this? Nope, it turns out you lied. Just because I didn’t think my major was relevant and didn’t initially mention it doesn’t make me a liar. I’ll admit I was wrong all day with no worries if you could even begin to prove some of the statements I have been opposing here, such as essential oils “are complete bunk.” But you can’t. I have however provided plenty of evidence that they are far from “complete bunk.”
The most people here have been able to claim is that research is minimal compared to medicine approved by the FDA. But research has nevertheless been done and shown cure rates well above zero. You can say there weren’t enough subjects but you’ve made up your mind. You’ll always likely say that. In the TTO study alone there were something like 160 subjects with a cure rate around 65% and improvement of symptoms above 70% from what I recall. I won’t brush up on statistics to actually do the math, but the chances of that many people being cured (well above placebo) with TTO in a blind, placebo controlled study being some sort of coincidence would be extremely statistically unlikely. Studies that showed only a small success over placebo were using a smaller concentration of TTO. The research does say something consistent with the thousands if not millions of people who have successfully used TTO as a means to treat their athlete’s foot.
There’s a difference between being approved by the FDA to treat something and proving something. Well put together studies prove things whereas approval is sometimes tainted by politics and money. A good example is the well established fact that ghost written research studies are rampant–that is when a pharmaceutical company designs a study (often not publishing the ones that show negative results), does it under the most favorable conditions possible to themselves (I’ve seen corruption first hand in this area) and has the resulting biased study published by an acclaimed academic who is paid to put his or her name on it. After this sort of practice and the money sometimes in the millions required to pay to get a drug on the fast track toward approval does the drug get approved. It’s botched research like this that leads to recalls after actual world research takes place and people start dying. I’m not at all claiming that all research or approvals are like this, just differentiating proof and FDA approval.
Sure, I said “I win,” once, as bait, because I wanted to see if anyone else would put anything worthwhile forward. In fact, if I wouldn’t have pushed so hard, the few points I found relevant may not have been put forth. But let’s be real, we all feel like we’re somewhat right here. But just because I poke holes in a lot of the posts here doesn’t warrant me being compared with Donald Trump. I’m not the one posting memes or yelling to make my point. I’m carefully dissecting posts mostly point for point and analyzing some of the relevant data I found from the first day I posted. I’ve been mostly polite, especially in comparison to the childlike tactics I’ve seen from this community, and even from its moderators.
Oh, do go on.
Give a man a shovel, get him banned for a day.
Teach a man to shovel…
I briefly gave him a custom title calling him a shill. Which I don’t think he is in any professional capacity.
-Tom
That was one thing I was referring to. There were also things said that I saw as a dishonest representation of what I said, but perhaps it was unintentional.
So you thought I would just say that if I knew it wasn’t actually the case? See, I don’t do that. I add information to a discussion. I don’t put out baseless low blows.
I feel like your own family could die from essential oils and you’d still not give two craps about this entire argument. Because your entire existence here here is to prove some immutable lesson that transcends rational thinking.
The answer to the question is, a couple essential oils have some basic beneficial properties but by and large the industry is a parasite preying on the ignorance and fears prove have about health and disease. There is no Norte and no less to this. You speak in half truths, false truths, and allusions.
Carefully winding your words to try and make everyone that calls out your baloney an enemy so you can play the innocent victim card. But the irony in this dicusssiob is the truly innocent victims are not yiu but the people who neglect medicine to heal those who have no say in their treatment. Parents of children and the elderly who have lost their reasoning abilities.
Instead, they spend that money on marketing.
I’m no expert, but common sense tells me that if the stuff really worked, they would find the money to get it approved. There may even be investors already in place to do exactly this.
But since FDA approval doesn’t carry much weight with you, it probably doesn’t matter.
People die from approved pharmaceuticals that were greedily rushed to the market and where health concerns were ignored and you don’t see me making far reaching conclusions about the entire drug industry. You make these asinine claims about hypothetical scenarios involving my family dying, wtf? It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve made it abundantly clear that some people play doctor when they shouldn’t and in any situation that it happens and someone gets hurts it’s a tragedy. But you keeps saying and insinuating that “I don’t care” just because I share information that lends credibility to the use of some essential oils for some things. Use your logic and reasoning to separate your strange paranoia from my premise and you’ll realize that what you are saying has no grounding in reality.
Furthermore, you’re a very dishonest person. You continually mislead anyone coming in here late to the discussion by saying “a couple” oils have some uses when the research indicates there are many. It doesn’t matter how many times you claim most of the industry is corrupt. You are making the claim and the burden of proof is on you–proof you clearly have no interest or ability in finding. If there was somehow some proof then I most certainly would acknowledge it. But understand, it doesn’t matter the tiniest bit. The truth has value, but clearly we’re going to disagree because you are making claims out of thin air and thus we’ll likely always disagree here. So who cares? Because in the end that has nothing to do with my point. My point isn’t to define the ratio between scammers and people sharing genuine knowledge. My aim was to provide evidence of the numerous medicinal uses of numerous essential oils in order to counter the bullshit claims that essential oils are “complete bunk.” This thread all started with @Penny_Dreadful’s tirade and unfounded claims. I noticed no one really came in with any real information outside of their preformed opinions so I brought actual research into the discussion.
All you’ve done is just repeat the same false information after I keep debunking it. You are intentionally deceiving people here. Good job.