Short Negative HPV Post

[joreth]

 This shouldn't take too long.  Someone I know who is way into the woo contracted HPV-caused genital warts a few years ago.  I haven't asked about the details of his infection, such as frequency or duration.  I just know he actually got the warts, most presumably from a partner who also had warts about a year before his first wart showed up.

Anyway, because he's way into the woo, he didn't get them frozen off or burned off, which is the typical method of treatment (which, btw, only removes the wart, not the virus - this can cause relief from the itchy/burning symptoms, and it is currently believed that the virus is less-transmissible when there are no physical symptoms - but it can still be transmitted).  No, he sought out a "natural remedy".  It's called D-lenolate, which sounds all medicine-like, but don't let the name fool you.  

As Dara O'Brian says, "Herbal medicine has been around for thousands of years!  Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'!  And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri."

So anyway, he took this stuff and his warts went away.  Therefore, this extract of olive leaf must have cured his HPV.  It couldn't be because warts come and go on their own whims or anything.  Nothing like some confirmation bias, eh?

I found it hard to believe that I wouldn't have heard of this particular remedy if it had been real, so I looked it up.  Turns out, I was right.

Every link that shows up in Google goes to a "natural wellness" store selling this crap, and one link goes to a 2006 cease and desist letter from the FDA saying this one company can't claim this shit cures anything or else it has to be classified as a drug.  And if it's a drug, then it needs to go through proper channels of FDA approval before it makes its claims.  Since it didn't go through proper channels, it can't make the claims.  Basically, it claims to be a "natural antibiotic" (psst! antibiotics kill bacteria, not viruses, and antibiotics are not recommended for treatment of viruses except in very specific cases where opportunistic bacterial colonization is a threat) that "boosts the immune system".

Just as an easy-to-remember rule of thumb, if something claims to 'boost the immune system", that's usually a good sign that these people have no idea how the immune system works and are cashing in on our ignorance with fancy, sciencey-sounding words.  You should automatically be suspicious when you see that red flag.  Legitimate, tested medicine does not claim to 'boost the immune system" because that's not how the immune system works (from the ever-snarky Mark Crislip, infectious disease specialist).

So then I looked it up on PubMed, which is the number one resource to see what tests have been done and filed with legitimate science-based organizations and are up for (or have been) peer reviewed.  Guess what?  Not a single mention of this stuff anywhere.  Not even a failed study.

In other words, IT HASN'T BEEN TESTED TO SHOW THAT IT DOES WHAT IT CLAIMS TO DO, which is cure or treat ANYTHING.

This doesn't mean that it does NOT do anything helpful.  It means that there is no evidence to suggest that it DOES do something helpful, and also no tests to make sure it's safe for human consumption.

If you have, or have been exposed to, HPV-Genital Warts, do yourself a favor and don't take the advice of "some guy".  Even if that "guy" is wearing a white lab coat.  Ask your doctor about the 3 or 4 freezing and burning methods.  They're uncomfortable, but warts are warts, and those are the only way to get rid of them.

Also, they might come back - it's a virus after all.  But don't take untested, unproven "remedies" - you don't know what that shit'll do.  If you're lucky, it won't do anything at all.

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

It's a good thing it isn't shown to be an antibiotic. Antibiotics are bad for you. They just are better for you than letting harmful bacteria do really nasty things to you. If you have a bacterial infection, use antibiotics if told to, by all means (and use them as told to). But antibiotics kill benign bacteria too, which means if you don't have any bacterial issues right now, you just created an environment for new bacteria to move in. What moves in might also be benign, and probably most of it will be, but you have increased your odds of getting something nasty (which is why this matters less if you already have something nasty). Plus, antibiotic use increases the odds of encouraging antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is harmful to everyone. It's a risk that is worth it to save lives, which is why I support the use of antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, but it isn't helpful when you do not have harmful bacteria. They had some studies showing an increased risk of health problems for the 3 months following antibiotic use.

People using antibiotics on viral problems is something that really bothers me. At least in this case they are using fake antibiotics on a viral issue. They may harm themselves, but it makes them less likely to harm others in the process.

[joreth]

Exactly! That's why they are now advising doctors to stop prescribing antibiotics "just cuz".

Frankly, I don't like the yeast infections that come with antibiotic use, so that's enough to make me use them only if that's the only treatment for something really nasty (like my damn cough that could be chronic bronchitis, could be pertussis, or could be an opportunistic bacterial infection due to acute bronchitis).

[zzita.livejournal.com]

just a couple of corrections:

>Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'!

actually it's only very recently that NIH funding, for example, has been allocated for testing of traditional remedies. most of it hasn't been tested yet. of the stuff they've tested, some works.

>if something claims to 'boost the immune system", that's usually a good sign that these people have no idea how the immune system works

i thought this myself, until i saw that researchers had done studies showing proliferation of various types of T-cell and NK cells after ingesting herbal medicines.

it's irrational to think that certain chemicals can't affect our biochemistry, just because those chemicals were first discovered in plants. after all, 90% of prescriptions are for drugs first found in nature.

do you know where antibiotics come from? bacteria that produce them are grown in big vats, and the compounds we want are extracted. not synthesized. antibiotics are a natural medicine. that doesn't mean they are safe for indiscriminate use, nor that they do nothing.

i'd like to see a lot more empiricism on both sides of this debate.

[joreth]

1) I'm not speaking about the NIH specifically
2) Not true, we tested willow bark decades ago and came up with aspirin. Everything science started with was "natural" because that's all we had. synthetics came later, and those are based on what we discovered worked from nature.

Yes I know where antibiotics come from and who the fuck ever said that chemicals don't affect our biochemstry?

I think you don't understand what that quote meant.

The point of that quote was to say that the alt-medicine industry is not an alternative to medicine. It is comprised by either treatments that are proven not to work, or treatments that have not been researched fully and therefore cannot make claims that they do work.

When a natural remedy is studied and shown to work, it becomes "medicine". The vast majority of our current medical remedies were originally found in nature.

However, they were first determined, empirically, to actually do something. Then the working elements were isolated from all the other elements in the natural source. Then the amounts were evaluated for the best efficacy. Then that amount was made available in a manner that allowed us to control the amount and quality of the element so that the treatment worked the same way the majority of the time.

Unlike, say, willow bark tea, from which we derive asprin, we can pop a pill and get exactly the amount necessary to take care of our headache with no other, possibly conflicting, ingredients. Or we can brew some willow bark tea and basically roll the dice on whether we got enough of the ingredient to affect the headache or whether we avoided anything else that might conflict or cause some other reaction.

Since you seem to be so completely unaware of what actual skeptics of alt-medicine are saying, I'll try to clear it up for you here:

No one who is a skeptic now or has ever claimed that ingredients or elements found in nature do not have an affect on the human body.

The claim is that so-called treatments that are offered under the label of alt-med are elements that fall under one of two categories: 1) elements that have been shown not to do what the alt-med corporations claim they can do. 2) elements that may do what the claim says they can do but have not been tested yet to prove they can do what the claim says they can do.

When an element has been researched, has shown to do something, and a dose has been recommended for best efficacy and least harm, that element is welcomed under the umbrella of "medicine". Yes, even when that element comes from "nature" since, y'know, almost all of medicine originally came from nature.

I'd like to see a lot less misunderstanding of what science-based medicine is and a lot fewer calls for "balance" and equality of "both sides" when one side is not even in the same league as the other.

[zzita.livejournal.com]

i'm sad that you are writing as if we are not on the same side here. it seems to me that we are both advocating the same things -- empiricism, rationality, and scientific testing of 'alternative' medicines. as opposed to making decisions (pro or con) without testing.

my purpose in posting was merely to point out some ways in which your statements were not consistent with those goals. perhaps i was too harsh in my phrasing. i was responding to your usual tone in these articles, and thinking that you would be most comfortable if i spoke your own language.

i think that if substance A has never been tested for medical use in any rigorous, document, published, replicable way, but has a large body of anecdotal evidence for efficacy, it makes sense to say that it's possible that it could be effective. or not. it makes sense to withhold judgment until testing is completed.

it will take many more centuries to test every substance in every food, plant, animal, mineral, insect, etc. on this fecund planet against every disease, discovered and undiscovered and yet-to-evolve. meanwhile we continue to exterminate species faster than we discover them. there's no reason at all to think the best AIDS drug wasn't in some patch of rainforest destroyed in 1985.

if it's any reassurance, my background is in biochemistry and i have nothing to do with herbal medicine.

[joreth]

"i think that if substance A has never been tested for medical use in any rigorous, document, published, replicable way, but has a large body of anecdotal evidence for efficacy, it makes sense to say that it's possible that it could be effective. or not. it makes sense to withhold judgment until testing is completed."

1) that would be the part where I said "has not been tested yet"
2) the plural of anecdote is not data.

Anecdotal "evidence" is well known to not be good sources of evidence. Anecdotes might give us a place to start, sort of a "hmm, that's interesting, let's see what's going on here", but they are not counted as evidence in support or against claims by legitimate scientific research for a number of well-known reasons.

Withholding judgement is the "has not been tested yet" part. It means it hasn't been tested, so it cannot make positive claims. I stated, explicitly, that it does not mean that the product does NOT do what it claims, it means that it hasn't been tested to show that it does.

I recognize that we are on the same side. I am writing about my frustration that you don't seem to see that I already made those points and that you don't need to clarify for me since I already covered that.

[zzita.livejournal.com]

"Anecdotal "evidence" is well known to not be good sources of evidence. Anecdotes might give us a place to start, sort of a "hmm, that's interesting, let's see what's going on here", "

yes, that is why i wrote (and you quoted me):

"it's possible that it could be effective. or not."

why did you feel the need to restate exactly what i had said, at greater length, and in a context that implied that we did not agree?

**

"I recognize that we are on the same side. I am writing about my frustration that you don't seem to see that I already made those points and that you don't need to clarify for me since I already covered that."

yes, i see that you have edited your original post to reflect some of the things i was saying. thank you.

you still might want to change this part, though:

"As Dara O'Brian says, "Herbal medicine has been around for thousands of years! Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'!""

it seems that you now agree that we have not 'tested it all'.

**

how did you come to be friends with someone as 'deep into the woo' as this guy, if you get so upset over someone who basically agrees with you, and just wants you to be a little more empirical?

oy, why do i try? because franklin seems to have such respect for you, that's why. i figured there had to be some there, there.

[joreth]

why did you feel the need to restate exactly what i had said, at greater length, and in a context that implied that we did not agree?

First of all, that's not what you said. Second of all, I didn't say it in a manner to imply that we didn't agree, I said it in a manner that implied my frustration that we *did* agree and you seemed to be arguing with me over it as if you thought I disagreed with you.

In the quote I used, what you said was that anecdotal evidence was good enough to suggest that an alt. med remedy might be effective, and what I said was that it was *not* good enough to suggest that it might be effective. I said it was good enough to investigate *whether or not* it's effective, or to see if something else is going on, which is often the case. That's the exact opposite of what you said.

The rest of your comment was calling for me to be more concerned with empiricism, and that was the frustration I exhibited because it appeared as though you don't seem to understand that the whole point of my post was support for empirical evidence, and that alt medicine either had none or had some against it, because when it has empirical evidence for it, it becomes labeled "medicine" and is no longer part of the alt. med pharmacy.

I also didn't edit my post, so that only reinforces my original opinion that you didn't read or understand clearly my points in the first place, which is why you offered "corrections" on points I was not making.

Sorry, but a quote is not up for changing. He said it that way, so it stays that way. You are free to approach him and ask him to retract his statement. I clarified and more accurately explained his quote in the rest of my post precisely because I know not everything has been tested (hence, the reason why I said that, explicitly), but I will not change the words within the quotation marks because they are not mine to change.

It is not always possible to know how deep into woo someone is when I first meet them. I also know lots of different types of people - I don't insulate myself to groups of people who only believe exactly as I believe. I was also more tolerant of woo when I was younger and this person stems from those days. There are many reasons how I came to be friends with someone who is "deep into the woo". I often disagree with my friends, but if you think this is "upset", you have a much higher opinion of yourself and your impact on strangers than you should. This is disagreement and annoyance that you could so miss my point.

If I am so trying to you, you can go elsewhere