Is it good to use natural remedies over prescription products? There is a substantial range of thought out there, much of it heavily unverified. But there’s one fact we can be sure of: natural remedies are not replacements for prescription medicines. You are not going to get your diabetes cure from a natural cure, so don’t be too naive about it.
Glance At every natural medicine, and you will see that they are listed as ‘not medicine’ and not to be treated like medicine. But that’s not fundamentally what we’re chatting about here.
The All-Important Placebo Effect.
In pretty much every medical trial ever performed, people are given a placebo, or a useless dose of nothing. They are not told that the medicine they are taking is having no effect. Without fail, scientists see that the placebo has a real effect.
This phenomena has been checked many times: it is one of the most important demonstrations of the brain’s power over the body; the skill of the mind to actually effect physical manifestations.
How You Can Use the Placebo Effect
If a proper M.D. told you to eat a pomegranate every day, because it would alleviate some sort of medical issue you had, you would probably do it. And very possibly, your mind could convince your body (how this works is still largely a science mystery) to treat that problem.
In sum, most natural medicines operate on a similar basis. They have not been fully tested in laboratory environments, so knowledge about the inherent properties in each natural remedy comes from experience. Claims are not put forward that a specific natural cure will fix a disease or malady, but in general, many properties of these natural cures have been known to function such an area before.
And if not, it doesn’t matter--you are taking a medicine, in much the same mode as a placebo, that is doing something towards your problem. But the fact that there is a body of non-scientific, general knowledge about this medicine (like, for example, that grapefruits are generally excellent for your body), has a very big effect on how your mind treats that pill-taking each day. When you consume the remedy and think about its claims, you are starting a process inside your body that laboratory science still does not fully get.
Why Placebos Don’t Always Work
Taking a useless pill alone isn’t going to help you. If it did, we’d all be using that method for many problems, especially when we don’t want to swallow an actual proper piece of medicine. We need a pill that is occupying the place between an actual prescription (and its potential side effects) and a placebo that does nothing.
Natural medicines fill this lack. They are not proper pills, they are only natural extracts, from plants and fruits and so on. They have some medicinal qualities, but the fact that they will fix your mild illness has not been scientifically borne out. That’s not the issue.
What is the most important thing is that you are starting the placebo effect, which is far stronger than you might expect. If you are not always happy about taking a pharmaceutical for a milder symptom of something (gas, for example), why not sample a natural product?
