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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • The stuff that works in herbal medicine have been studied and improved in modern medicine. The two can’t and shouldn’t be equated. Anyone claiming herbal medicine should be respected and not condemned is a crook and/or idiot. Most proponents are crooks, trying to sell things they know or don’t care if they work.

    Things like paracetamol and lithium have a basis in herbal medicine. Paracetamol was improved to stop the horrendous damage the herbal medicine did to your kidneys. Lithium was quantified and controlled to minimise the impact of taking a toxic mental (Lithium was sold as natural healing waters found in springs, it was scientist investigating these waters that identified lithium as an element), newer less toxic medicines are now available for these conditions.

    Medicine displaced herbal remedies. The regulation of medicine means the only practionationers of herbal medicines are unregulated crooks.





  • Not all patents are good. But a patent system is good. It could be better but the general concept is not flawed like the person I was responding to suggests.

    The physical object isn’t what is patented in this case. It is the method to create the object that has a patent. One that can’t be reversed engineered as it isn’t part of the final product. You could only reverse engineer it if the process was not novel or not obvious to anyone knowledgeable in the field. If both of these conditions are true then the patent should not have been granted.

    Patents are not inherently bad. This is a bad patent. Patent laws don’t have to be changed, because this patent shouldn’t have been granted. The issue is ineffective patent reviews, not patents. Getting rid of patents is not a good idea. If you think it is you probably don’t have a good enough grasp on what a patent is.

    You can make something if you figure out how they did it because it was obvious. In this case the patent isn’t valid. If you have to develop a solution then the patent is probably valid. The patent is a reward for developing and sharing the solution publically.

    If you still don’t grasp why patents are useful. It may be helpful to think of it like open source software. The patent is the code base that is freely accessible to everyone. This preserves the knowledge and lets others build on it. However, to incentivise people to make their code open source you provide protections that stop others from selling the same code you developed.

    The incentive mechanism is why far more businesses produce patents than produce open source code.

    If you remove patents businesses stop funding internal r and d overnight. It increase the risk and reduces the reward.





  • People have attached pens to 3d printers and used them to write letters, effectively print. Most consumer 3D printers are useing or based on open source software.

    I think the issue is, printers are relatively cheap to buy and replace. So building your own and programming it hasn’t been necessary. Where as 3d printing was completely in accessible before the reprap movement. 3D printing software is open source as it is motivated by people wanting to build their own machines that could build machines. Something you couldn’t easily buy.





  • This is a common misconception of the placebo effect. The placebo effect is a measurement issue, not an actual benefit.

    Tests are corrupted by using the reposnes and judgement of humans. People will say they had some sort of benefit because of expectations, poor recollection and politeness. It doesn’t mean a benefit was gained. A placebo group allows researchers to quantify how much the placebo effect has on the data they gathered, they can then see if the experiment they did had any effect. Placebo is literally our definition of zero effect.

    Anyone telling you placebo is a good thing is wrong, misinformed or deliberately misleading you. In many countries it is illegal for doctors to prescribe ‘placebo treatments’. They will still recommend such things to their patients - not because they work but because they get the patient out the door and less likely to come bother them again.