:-)!
Very clever analogy as the "founder" of homeopathy in Germany was eating cinchona bark to cure malaria. Maybe a little too sophisticated for your audience here, but I give you full props. Thanks for an hour or too of exercise for the "little grey cells".
Another analogy which I would like you to comment on, we love your anecdotes, is chelation therapy (EDTA) for arteriosclerosis. It was sold, like Chloroquine, as a dramatic cure, with no clinical trials backing up the reported results but unlike homeopathics there was some lab bench work in 1955 and again in 1981 giving it credence and there was at least a plausible hypothesis of how it functions.
My doctor, William Campbell Douglass, in 1980's Marietta, GA, ran a chelation business out of his office back then. His most famous patient was Junior Samples of "HeeHaw" fame. Douglass wrote a book or pamphlet, "Chelation Works"(?) but then went on to one thing after another including "The Milk of Human Kindness is Not Pasteurized", and "The Health Benefits of Tobacco"(!) He wrote a lot of books not all of which are useless.
When Junior Samples died, in 1983, they said he had started chelation when it was too late. The laetrile clinics in Mexico said that they got their cancer patients too late. HCQ does not work if you give it too late. I believe that. But when we get the studies and then we will know.
I really enjoyed the Q&A threads thanks! BrianD
There are a lot of ideas that bear looking at but nay doctor who breathlessly blasts emails to the world sound really now better. Chelation had some theoretical underpinnings. When I scrubbed and did carotid endartectomies and other (aorta Bifems, etc.) you can really feel the plaques are “gritty”. Of course atheromatious plaques are almost pure cholesterol. But the immune system sends in macrophages to try to “clean up” and they die and become calcified so that is the source of that.
I guess the thought was circulating chelating agents would bind that calcium and reduce the plaque or something. It never IMHO was ever really well thought out. They had a chemical, they could make money, it never showed ay clinical results, some people got taken for suckers.
Another one I had more respect for came along the H. Pylori from ulcers. Once they discovered that this bug lived in stomach acid they started looking for it elsewhere ad low and behold, there were reports that it was living in the slime on your teeth. Then it was hypothesized that people were developing antibodies that were contributing to the atheromas because, surprise surprise, they were living in arteriosclerosis plaques as well. So they started antibiotic trials for cardiovascular disease. Didn’t work. But “A” for effort.
Thanks. So you can see why I am skeptical of commercialized fantastic claims.