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Researchers Found Perfect Contraceptives In Traditional Chinese Medicine (inverse.com)
hackingbear writes:
Researchers at U.C. Berkeley found a birth control that was hormone-free, 100 percent natural, resulted in no side effects, didn't harm either eggs nor sperm, could be used in the long-term or short-term, and -- perhaps the best part of all -- could be used either before or after conception, from ancient Chinese folk medicine... "Because these two plant compounds block fertilization at very, very low concentrations -- about 10 times lower than levels of levonorgestrel in Plan B -- they could be a new generation of emergency contraceptive we nicknamed 'molecular condoms,'" team leader Polina Lishko.
Used after conception for emergency contraception but works by preventing the sperm and egg meeting, that is contradictory.
However there is a lot of claims here. In general trying to describe the perfect birth control. With the promise of it originated from some ancient Chinese secret. Smells fishy to me.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What stage of grief is 'idiotic snark'?
Get on with it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Also I can't square "has zero side effects" with "blocks conception". It either does something or it doesn't. There is no such thing as "zero side effects" for compounds that are active in the body.
If the only thing it does is block conception, then it has zero side effects. I'll wait to hear whether that's actually true, but the definition of a side effect is an effect other than the primary one.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It certainly seems worth a closer look and avoids many of the common "too good to be true" signs.
But too much crap science makes it through peer review and into good journals. I'm expecting "too good to be true" once more people study it.
So "skeptical but willing to be convinced" seems the right frame of mind for this. Birth control with fewer side effects would be a great thing for the world. (Less opposition to birth control from religious groups in the US would be even better, but I don't expect miracles.)
I agree with the sentiment to be cautious of such extraordinary claims, which, to quote the familiar saying by Sagan and Truzzi, "require extraordinary evidence."
That said, do not assume that traditional Chinese medicine does not carry the possibility of valuable scientific and medical discoveries. The relatively recent discovery of the potent antimalarial properties of artemisinin was due to research in traditional Chinese herbs and medicines. Now, to be sure, there are a lot of things that traditional Chinese medicine gets wrong, but after thousands of years of trial and error and seeing what works and what doesn't, the resulting herbal pharmacopoeia almost invariably contains useful information about a myriad of plant compounds whose properties have not yet been analyzed by Western medicine.
What an idiotic response to the only response to this story to seriously evaluate the claims being made in the article.
Congratulations on standing head and shoulders above all the other thoughtless douches in your stupidity. You've earned it!
So when I read "about 10 times lower than levels of levonorgestrel in Plan B"
This comes off as crap designed to flog 'information' to the the ignorant public. But (and someone please correct me) this statement is meaningless. Any medication has an effective dosage, and method of function. Levonorgestrel and the chemicals mentioned in this article don't function in a similar manner. To compare the concentrations is meaningless, and leads people to believe in some false metric between them.
Frankly, the "thousands of years of trial and error" are largely irrelevant. Pretty much any large collection of plant extracts will include many compounds with pharmacological effects on humans, so there's a high probability that some of them will be 1) previously unknown to medical science (because medical science takes time, and it hasn't had a lot of it yet), and 2) useful.
There's no magic to traditional blah blah whatever nonsense. You assemble a great big grab-bag of random junk, and there's a good chance of something interesting being in among the rubbish.