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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
A 57-year-old woman spent six days in the hospital for severe liver damage after taking daily megadoses of the popular herbal supplement, turmeric, which she had seen touted on social media, according to NBC News.
The woman, Katie Mohan, told the outlet that she had seen a doctor on Instagram suggesting it was useful against inflammation and joint pain. So, she began taking turmeric capsules at a dose of 2,250 mg per day. According to the World Health Organization, an acceptable daily dose is up to 3 mg per kilogram of weight per day—for a 150-pound (68 kg) adult, that would be about 204 mg per day. Mohan was taking more than 10 times that amount.
Please don’t dismiss supplement users as pseudoscience fanatics.
You have no idea what it’s like to live with a chronic illness, with no cure, and no treatment to eliminate the pain and suffering.
People like you harbor misconceptions about modern medicine as an infallible cure-all that isn’t riddled with systemic neglect for women, PoC, the uninsured, and chronically ill people.
I take 8 supplements and 7 prescription medications a day. It fucking sucks to have to down 15 pills at night and another 7 in the morning. The only reason why I do is because those supplements are one of very few things that give a modicum of relief to the unending nightmare of pain.
And please don’t start with the ‘well ahktually studies shows that it doesn’t work and it’s just placebo.’ Please don’t decide for us how our own body feels. You cannot disprove our own symptoms to us, not especially when modern medicine has neglected chronic and autoimmune conditions for so long. Because these conditions primarily affect women, and women have not been treated as reliable witnesses to their own bodies, many chronic illnesses haven’t even been accepted as ‘real’ conditions until the last few decades.
So please stop with the psuedoscience accusations. Doctors and researchers have no fucks to give about chronically ill patients, and we are left to trial and error every over the counter supplement we can do we don’t kill ourselves from going insane with untreated pain and suffering.
Thank you, I wish more people would get this. Access to healthcare is privilege, and full of it’s own problems. Also, everyone crying pseudoscience in this thread is just flat out wrong in this case - turmeric is one of the most heavily studied supplements these days, and has been shown to be an effective anti-inflammatory and beneficial for autoimmune diseases, which is exactly what was claimed by the Instagram doctor referenced in the article.
I left a comment elsewhere in this post, full of studies on the subject.
Pseudoscience is correct, as they are replicating the look of something scientific without the substance.
Feel free to try whatever you think helps you. Don’t complain when people correctly point out that there is no evidence to suggest it will, or that it’s even safe for you.
Are you sure about that? You should really do some fact-checking before boldly claiming something is pseudoscience.
Damn you really felt called out, huh?
If you’re not disabled or chronically ill, please sit down and listen to people who are. Lack of ‘medical evidence’ does not constitute a lack of medical effectiveness. The same way that a lack of diagnosis due to medical neglect does not constitute a lack of symptoms.
THC and CBD has always been used by chronically ill people, who were dismissed as drug addicts for using ‘medically unsubstantiated’ herbs to treat their pain. Just because research on marijuana is finally being conducted in recent times and it is being validated as a form of treatment, it doesn’t mean that it only suddenly became effective. It always has been. The only thing that has changed is public perception of it.
It’s easy for able bodied people to point at chronically ill people and claim that everything they do is a hoax or just placebo when they know nothing about how chronic illness works. Listen to them, and treat them as reliable witnesses to their own body.
A medical paper doesn’t dictate the reality of how supplement affects each patient individually. Every person’s biochemistry is unique. It’s especially problematic when modern medicine is rife with systemic bias against certain groups of people. Ask doctors over the age of 60 and ask doctors who recently graduated if they think fibromyalgia is a real disease. It’s disgusting how older doctors don’t even think it’s a real condition and that patients are just ‘faking it’.