The Price of the Future - Resistance of Change

Since the dawn of time, at least a few million years ago, humanity has always been afraid of change. This is apparent in our mythology, gods that never change and laws that are definitive.

One area that this fear has affected most is technology and science. When humans first learned the Earth was not flat, anyone who stated it was not flat were tortured to death simply for stating the possibility of some other curvature.

In the Dark Ages, any form of technology was met with hatred and violence, the inventor and user were tortured to death, accused of witchcraft and deals with an imaginary adversary. Even today, with the resistance against clean energy and modern genetic modifications, people are fighting hard to prevent this new technology, even going so far as to start wars to slow progress.

The world of religion is the greatest weight against modern technology and scientific advancement, many even oppose some necessary scientific theories, responsible for their survival, out of fear of change. Others are more straight forward, attacking and killing those claiming the new technology is a sign of their imaginary adversary.

However, this is not limited to religion, there are those who oppose change because someone in an obsolete industry told them it's bad. Genetic modification is a method of producing food which we can eat, and grow, that has been used for thousands of years.

Yet people oppose the more modern methods, they often cite studies that are not only fraudulent or fallacious, but often outright lies. The new technique simply takes the margin of error to a minimum, crossbreeding is very prone to error, just ask a cow.

Another such group, which is aptly named anti-vaxxers, oppose modern medicine in place of ancient herbology and other such woo woo. Synthetic medicines and chemicals never add anything, but they do remove other chemicals that can cause harm.

Herbs are the same as drinking a glass of unfiltered water just because there's one drop of lemon juice in it, homeopathy is a gallon of filtered water for the same. Lemons, citrus fruits in general, is a great example of the difference.

Citrus fruits will prevent an illness that plagued sailors, known as scurvy. Scurvy is rare today, we often do jot even hear of it, because we discovered the reason citrus helped prevent it and, using modern chemistry, we started putting it into all of our foods. We also sell this chemical in pill form and tasty candies.

Vitamin C, a chemical that citrus fruits contain high amounts of, is found to be an essential vitamin we have lost the ability to produce, as a genus. Homo species have to get this vitamin through consumption of foods that contain large amounts, this is why all of us apes love fruit, especially citrus fruits.

The problem lies in the quantity required for certain environments, humans have learned to live in all environments so this affects us most. Urban regions are most likely to spread scurvy, as well as other illnesses that vitamin C helps combat, so the vast majority of us need lots of vitamin C to keep healthy.

The fruit is tasty, so eating enough won't be a problem, until you notice the enamel on your teeth vanishing. All fruits that contain vitamin C contain acids as well, citric acid and ascorbic acid are both very corrosive. This means you will lose your teeth eating enough fruits to stay healthy.

The alternative, a process call refining or synthesizing. This allows us to take the essential vitamin from the rest of the chemicals, or produce it, then we can safely consume as much as we need without worrying about the ill effects.

This is what modern medicine is, those against it are paid for by those who would prefer you get sick, or buy their product and live with no teeth. There are many such groups, selling either "organic" and the mythical "all natural" or herbs and woo woo.

The easy way to make them stumble is to ask for the evidence, when they pull up some study look for the scientific journal it was published and verify it. Most likely, it was not even published, often it will be a misrepresentation of the actual paper (common for anti-GMO nuts).

This fear of new needs to end for our species to ever improve beyond today with any pace worthy of our great ape ancestry. This means we must be rid of our superstitions of old, end the delusion called religion, and stop listening to big corporations just because they support dark aged methods.

I love living in the future, but I want to see tomorrow, and will fight all junk science and mythology to increase my chances of this.

GMO, Homeopathy - The Real Scams

"All natural," "organic," and "artificial" are both misnomers, for much the same reason. Better descriptives would be "unprocessed," "processed," and "manufactured." Let's use the medicine as the example here as I have been facing a few homeopaths and anti-GMO folks recently who could benefit from this lesson.

Yes, all of the chemicals we use in medicine are found in various other organisms, primarily plants. These chemicals rarely manufactured for pharmaceuticals, a claim I often hear from homeopaths, yet even if they were manufactured there would be no difference from those found in plants.

There is a huge difference in the compounds though, and this difference is why homeopathic medicines have, at least, twice the number of side effects. The processed chemicals are mixed only with inert agents, to preserve the chemical structures when stored in pill forms. These inert agents have no side effects, and are most often sugar.

For a plant with the same chemical you have at least three or four additional active ingredients, in pill form you still have the inert agents processed chemicals have as well. These additional active ingredients offer more side effects and a larger risk of drug interaction.

Now here's the real problem, the manufactured dosage is scientifically determined based on body mass and physiology, very little guess work done. The homeopathic remedies are miniscule dosages of the desired chemical, and not scientifically tested nor managed, mostly guess work.

Most homeopathic remedies have less then 100th of a percent of the desired active ingredient, the majority is a collection of undesired (often unknown) active ingredients that can alter you physiology in unpredictable ways. This is only the beginning of the problems, mind you.

Many homeopaths will tell you to take something that has no actual benefits to your ailment as well. They will cite studies that were either inconclusive or incorrectly reported as supportive evidence to convince you it's a good idea. This is your cue to ask for a real doctor.

Now, back to the processed pharmaceuticals. Most often they process the plants and remove all the undesired chemicals, leaving only the active ingredient you need. Lately we have been improving our chemical technologies and are manufacturing many of the chemicals from scratch.

Now, the manufactured ones are no different from the processed or unprocessed chemicals, they all have the same atoms. The manufactured ones have a huge benefit, less risk of an unwanted active ingredient getting into the mix.

The reason I mentioned anti-GMO in the beginning is because this is the same thing they do for pesticides and herbicides that are demonized, the pesticides and herbicides labeled as "organic" are actually worse, they are indiscriminate poisons with a lot of undesired active ingredients. The manufactured pesticides and herbicides are targeted poisons, they only kill what is needed and leave the rest unharmed.

The next time some quack or nut tells you that "big pharma" is out for a profit, ask them how much they paid for their Russian roulette style medicine, chances are they paid three to ten times what a processed medicine costs. Then ask them to list off the possible side effects for laughs.