Health

IF we allow performance enhacing drugs, in the end it would come down to who takes the better drug instead of who can legitimately run faster or throw harder. This is not the spirit of sport.

If sex wasn't a ridiculous amount of fun the abstinence-only education strategy wouldn't be a ridiculous amount of bullshit.

"Those who take issue with homeopathy do so because..."
the theory underlying homeopathy is incoherent, a suspicion that is validated by numerous empirical studies which show that homeopathic remedies have no measurable effect beyond a placebo.

A homeopathic concoction can be replaced with water, and there is no difference in efficacy. This shows that any therapeutic effects of homeopathy do not come from the medicine itself. This makes homeopathic medicine a placebo, a term homeopaths don't like, because it empowers patients with an understanding of the difference between real and fake medicine.

Regarding developing countries - we should not waste our time and theirs exporting non-scientific medicine that has failed to work in our own countries. People in developing countries need more education - not more voodoo. I'm highly suspicious of claims that homeopathic remedies help with heavy metal poisoning and chronic diarrhea. Furthermore, the long-term self-help solution here is to education them on acquiring clean water and sanitation. How are they supposed to understand what clean water and sanitation is, when we pollute their heads with homeopathic theories that distort and deny the scientific basis of disease, and for that matter, can't even define "water" correctly?

The extended research on homeopathy has shown that, because of the extended doctor/patient relationships and lengthy visits (often three + hours) patients benefit from homeopathic attention without the proper remedy. Since the doctor/patient relationship provides significant healing (mistaken experts are calling it a placebo effect, when it is the caring effect seen throughout medicine) the homeopathic remedies themselves are less robust in their significance of effect.

Those who take issue with homeopathy do so because it "is a waste of time" when we have significant studies on the alleviation of life threatening illnesses in developing countries. In these situations it is not homeopathy versus conventional medicine, it is homeopathy versus no intervention. The mistaken belief that we will be capable of providing the model of healthcare available in some countries worldwide is a delusion. We need to look at those trials of substances within homeopathy that are effective at alleviating heavy metal poisoning and chronic diarrhea. It is because of its dilution that homeopathy can be dispensed for almost nothing to a desperately ill world.

I wouldn't do it...
partly because I want one successful demonstration of a technology before I'll spend a cent on actually purchasing it.

I lived with my husband before I married him. It has been 10 years, a house and two children and I still love him and our sex life gets better every time. I am not saying we are June and Ward but what ever happen to really loving some one with all your heart and sticking it out through the rough stuff and I am not talking about abuse of any kind but certain things that a marriage can be faced with if you love yourself enough and love your partner enough then you can make it. Young people in the USA are too fickle they want the new, now!!!

Good to see Deepak is getting his slice of this $40 billion industry of bullshit.

Hallucinogens at best have the same effect as dreams??? The mere fact that you are awake on hallucinogens already makes a comparison with dreams very weak. Qualitatively, they're vastly different. Quantitatively, for most people, the former is orders of magnitude more vivid than the latter.

Are drugs an escape? Perhaps this would be a good separate question for TakeOnIt. Yes, I think drugs like heroin are precisely that. However, we're talking here about entheogens, not depressants. Entheogens are more of a tool we can use to explore our mind, and it can often make us confront ourselves. A simple example of this, is they can make you aware that you hold two contradictory beliefs, where due to the inevitable ruts that our mind forms, we were previously unable to draw those beliefs into our awareness.

Are drug experiences meaningless because they are not "real"? Possibly yet another good question for TakeOnIt. Yes, it's possible to gain false beliefs from drugs (though the same is true for non-drug induced spiritual experiences). But it's also possible to gain true beliefs from drugs.

Finally, the real comparison here is whether we should spend 100% of our time in a completely normal state, vs. 99.x% of our time in a completely normal state. If people really want to avoid "escaping" and "diminishing" their lives, they should be less concerned with avoiding hallucinogens and far more concerned with the numerous frivolous activities that they sink hours into each day.

The "visions" you experience when under the influence of hallucinogens are distortions of the brain's functions. At best they have the same effect as dreams, that the brain can reorganize itself. Other methods like enough sleep or meditation, however, are much better at that task and have no negative side effects.

At worst hallucinations are a means to ignore or evade reality. Reality, however, is what one's life is. To evade reality means to evade one's life and therfore does not only not enrich life but actually diminishes it.

"the LSD-induced mystical state differs as significantly from the natural one as an artificial pearl from the real thing."

What a metaphor to choose! This reminds me of the question I want to add on whether "naturally occurring" diamonds have more meaning that artificial diamonds, even though the two are becoming so indistinguishable that the biggest diamond company in the world (De Beers) plans to fingerprint the "real" diamonds for "authenticity". Perhaps people need to take some acid to realize that diamonds have little intrinsic value but rather an agreed upon value. Few other products - other than money itself - have such a high ratio of agreed-upon to intrinsic value. (Priceless art has a high ratio, but not as high). People of course, when they show you their diamond, always talk to you as if its value was entirely intrinsic. "Behold how shiny and sparkling my diamond is!" Actually, maybe they don't need to take acid.

"I haven't seen good reason to believe that a fetus isn't a person."
I believe the moral confusion occurs because people crave an absolute line where what exists is a gradual development into personhood. The question Is the value of a life proportional to its level of consciousness? seems to be the most logical reason to believe that a fetus isn't yet a person.

My position is a bit complicated.

Do I support Obama/Pelosi's health bill? No, absolutely not.
Do I think health care needs reform? Yes, and badly.

Essentially, the health care market is broken. Insurance comes with perverse incentives that make health care unnaturally expensive and poor quality. Reforms to bring health care closer to a free market -- mainly, ending the subsidy for health insurance -- would make health care much cheaper and more easily available. With the savings from reform, we could afford to subsidize health care (perhaps in the form of vouchers or health savings accounts) for low-income Americans, and I think we should do so. That's "universal health care" of a sort, but it's definitely not universal health insurance.

Another quote from David Pearce here:

"The disparate drugs we label “psychedelics” - lysergamides like LSD-25, tryptamines like DMT and psilocybin, and phenethylamines such as mescaline - are sometimes exhilarating. At best, they are life-transforming and soul-enriching. They can certainly be mind-wrenching. Taking major psychedelics can generate experiences too outlandish for our normal conceptual framework to accommodate. We haven't even names for the strange new modes of perception, selfhood and introspection their biochemical pathways disclose."

A thought regarding his other quote: I've heard that DMT is naturally released by the brain when one dies - perhaps like it or not we leave this world on a high.