Essential oils for broken legs.
Preventative medicine, nutrition, etc have an impressive record for everything else. Essential oils may be a rather small part of this.
Many people talk dumb nonsense. Doesn't mean you should pay attention. Next time you have kidney trouble, appendicitis, an infected gal bladder, a blood clot in your aorta, a leaky heart valve or an infected tooth you'll be talking to a yoga mom then?
...have we so soon forgotten the risks and consequences of viral mutation? 2020 and part of 2021 was the world trying to prevent COVID from mutating and following the same trajectory as the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak.
Institutions fail, and when they do, it's a huge disaster. Absent institutions, the general public also fails, and when they do, it's a huge disaster.
Now, compare the failure rates.
When individuals fail, we seem to think, either "well, they'll get smarter for the next time" or "well, I'm smart, so that won't happen to me" (the famous last words of every mark that walked the earth), yet when institutions fail, the prevailing wisdom seems to be, "institutions always fail"... this despite institutions effectively being composed of individuals, but with systemic checks and balances in place that attempt to mitigate for the failings of both individuals and institutions.
There's a long line of con men, fraudsters, quacks, etc. (let alone strategic/systemic adversaries) cheering in the bleachers, hoping that the public will decide that institutions cannot help and that "doing your own research" is the path to success.
It reminds me of this recent quote from Cory Doctorow:
>We’ve had massive institutional failures that make people not believe anything. We focus a lot on the technical mechanics of why people don’t believe anything. Ten years ago, my pain specialist wanted me to go on opioids. I did my own research and determined that big Pharma was conspiring to kill people like me and I was right. The fact that I have the same epistemological basis for my healthcare decision-making as anti-vaxxers is undertheorized in rooms like this one. We leave people in an epistemological void.
Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-d...