Good grief! Saying that the news is telling people not to drink water seems like an overreaction to today’s “news” that drinking 8 glasses of water a day “is of little benefit,” but there it is on Reuters:

There is no clearcut scientific rationale for the average healthy individual to drink a lot of water—and it may be downright harmful—according to two kidney experts. (Emphasis mine.)

Why has this become a news item? There is no new evidence to counter the idea that drinking 6 - 8 glasses of water per day is a good idea. Some researchers simply reviewed existing studies and did not find that this recommendation was “evidence based,” which means there aren’t randomized double blind clinical trials to support the recommendation. I guess the bottled water industry has not been devoting enough of their budget to R&D. So now what? We don’t need to drink much water unless some scientists confirm it’s a good idea.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t advocate believing everything you hear and I don’t oppose looking into claims with scientific research. But along comes junk science like this and we get headlines such as, “Busting The 8-Glasses-A-Day Myth” … (more)

Before I started learning about homeopathy and natural healing I had the idea that there was only two things to do in health care: fix a problem or develop healthier habits. There are more possibilities, however. In my quest to better explain this, I’ve divided the continuum of methods into four groups, in a somewhat arbitrary but hopefully useful way. Conventional methods focus on fixing something, whereas natural methods focus on the natural healing abilities of the organism.

Take the example of someone who develops very high blood pressure, seemingly because of some work related stress. What kinds of things can you do for such a person? Here are some of my ideas.

1. Intervention

Give pharmaceuticals to get the blood pressure down.

2. Environmental

Perhaps a poor diet is contributing to the problem? (High salt, lots of stimulants, etc.)

Change jobs.

3. Supportive

Mind-body techniques to help the person relax, such as yoga, meditation, visualization.

Therapy to help the person work out stress and develop techniques for dealing with stress.

4. Root

Addressing the root imbalance which has lead this person to be susceptible to stress and high blood pressure in the first place. For example, therapy might uncover some deeper issue. So … (more)

Many people think that the term “natural healing” or “natural medicine” refers to using herbs and other natural substances as a method of treatment. However, natural healing actually refers to an organism’s own inherent healing abilities. Conventional medicine is all about direct intervention. Natural medicine is about supporting and stimulating the body and mind to heal itself.

Different health care modalities line up along a continuum from a “fix it” approach to the purely “energetic” approaches. I came up with a simple breakdown of this continuum into four stages. Natural healing encompasses the last three. The stages are increasingly holistic and inclusive, meaning that the higher levels assume the other levels are also necessary.

1.    Intervention. This is conventional medicine. Something must done to control the symptoms. Getting the patient to alter their lifestyle is also a consideration, but is usually secondary.

2.    Environmental. This first stage of natural medicine recognizes the body’s own healing mechanisms and looks for a cause of why the body is not healing itself. The emphasis is usually on poor diet, environmental toxins, stress, etc. Get the patient to change their environment and/or habits in order to remove the obstacle(s) and the body can often heal itself. Direct … (more)

While I was taking a longer than anticipated break from blogging—doing some extracurricular activities like getting a house built—I had time to reassess my blog. While I still plan to do my part at putting true information about homeopathy on the internet amid a sea of false and ignorant comments, that is only part of my intent. I enjoy a good argument as well as the next guy, but a lot of the arguments with the neo-skeptics are just arguing for it’s own sake. I got more caught up in it that I want to. The larger goal was just to write a blog about health and life from my perspective, which is that of a scientific/technical guy exploring “the other side” and trying to figure out how to integrate the two.

I’ve decided to rename my blog as I’m restarting it. I originally came up with the name “woo-woo science” because despite my journey into it, a lot of what I consider to be the frontier of a new scientific paradigm makes me uncomfortable. In other words, “woo-woo.” Part of me wishes the world was the relatively simple materialistic, logical place that scientism claims it is. But that’s not my … (more)