In America, where I happen to live, football refers to a generally over-praised sport in which two teams of large individuals in foam and spandex run at and smash each other with the intention of getting a squashed-looking ball into an area at the end of a 100 yard patch of grass and preventing the other team from getting it to their end. Though the timer only times one hour, the game stops so much that it takes roughly four hours to play. In pretty much every other country, football refers to a game in which two teams of people in shorts kick a ball back and forth with the intention of getting it to go into a frame with a net attached and to prevent the other team from getting the ball into the other net. There is usually an awful lot of bad acting involved and the patch of grass is so big and the ability of the players to accomplish their objective so limited, the majority of the game is spent sending the ball back and forth without scoring. Americans refer to this same exercise as soccer.
A lot of other countries claim that Americans do not play true football (as the other countries' football is the one actually played with feet) and that the game Americans refer to as football is in every way inferior to rugby, which is basically a rougher version of American football where they wear less padding, supposedly stop less, can't pass the ball forward, and occasionally do a cheerleader formation (in order to block the ball, or something). I say it supposedly stops less because in the rugby I have watched, there is still a considerable amount of time spent setting up and standing around. Americans in turn tend to tell the other countries that they are being silly and should use soccer for the sport played with feet because it is less confusing given American football doesn't have another name by which to call it.
As you might have deduced, I don't have much fondness for any of the sports that are called football. Still, I have to at least partially side with my fellow countrymen. Soccer, as it turns out, is actually a British term used originally as a colloquial name for association football in order to give it a shorter name, but still distinguish it from rugby football, which is the rugby game described above. More on this can be read about here. What I find important about this information is that now the count of sports that are or have been referred to as football is up to three: rugby, soccer, and American football.
My husband loves a game called handball, but this is not the Olympic sport where teams of people hit a ball back and forth at each other with their hands. No, this is handball where you play it like racquetball, except that you replace all rackets with hands. I bring this up because it is another instance of the point I am going to make: naming a game after a body part and following it up with the name of the object that a large number of sports use in some form is a terribly unspecific way to name a game. It gets confusing because any number of sports could be described that way. It is like calling desserts "baked sugar" or "whipped sugar;" I really have no more of an idea of what the dessert is and I can't be sure you don't mean some other dish in which sugar is baked or whipped.
To me, names should distinguish and football really fails to do that; soccer is really only used to refer to one game, thus I consider it preferable. The thing I disagree with other Americans on is that once the net game in shorts is referred to as soccer, football should then be used to refer to the sport with the foam and spandex described above. As I have discussed, it is a really useless name. Thus, I think it would be much better to come up with a new name entirely. So far, my husband and I have come up with merrer (derived from American like soccer is derived from association), but we are not sure that is the best name. Any other suggestions?
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Sensationalism Is Not an Acceptable Substitute for Scientific Reasoning
I read this article recently. "Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don’t respect them, study finds." At first I thought it was an entertaining article. Now it kind of bothers me a bit.
I get that it is popular to find sexism in everything, but that is no excuse for publishing garbage science. Or presenting such a misleading headline. The study just found that female hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes when comparing 2 very unequal sample groups and that when asked about hypothetical hurricanes, people tended to estimate that ones with male names were more devastating. We will discuss the hypothetical storms first.
People consider hypothetical storms with female names less threatening than hypothetical storms with male names. I concede that I may just not be understanding what they did, but from the description in the article, it seems like they just asked people how threatening different storms sounded to them and how likely they would be to evacuate if Hurricane Danny (or Hurricane Debby) was on its way (I borrowed these names from the actual 6 year rotating list you can find here. I don't know if the study used these names, but they probably should have). Apparently people said the female storms were less threatening.
Okay, if this is indeed what they did, all they did was prove that people found female names less threatening (which may be sexist, but it still has nothing to do with hurricanes). They did nothing to show that people actually behaved differently as a result of these names. If you asked me how dangerous I thought an imaginary hurricane was I would have to base my answer on the limited information given me, which seems to be mostly a name; this study found that people perceive male names as more dangerous. If you asked me how dangerous I perceived a real hurricane is I would base my answer on pretty much all the information but the name. In a study room with no real threat, I may be perfectly content to base my assessment of the imaginary off of completely arbitrary things like my dislike of that kid Dean in my 3rd grade class; hey, I decide who I am rooting for in sports that way all the time. In real life, I would never base a decision about evacuating entirely on a name.
Maybe I am alone in this and other people regularly decide whether to risk their lives based on something completely unrelated to the problem at hand. Still, I don't accept that finding that people assess female names that they happen to be told are hurricanes as less threatening than male names they happen to be told are hurricanes as proof that naming a storm after a girl makes it more likely to kill people. There is just a bit too much of a leap there for me. Of course, if you could compare real male and female storms and control for all other variables (besides the name) and you found female storms were significantly more deadly, then you might have something.
So, without further ado, we move on to the study's comparison of male and female storms.
"Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning 1950 and 2012. Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the female-named hurricanes produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities."
So let me get this straight: you took a period of 62 years, took only the 47 most devastating hurricanes (which is a bit of a suspiciously random number by the way. I guess the results were less interesting if they used the top 50), and then used it to determine that people are sexist when it comes to hurricanes. Of course, for the first 29 years, they only gave out female names, so any differences could just as easily be credited to advancements in life-saving technology by the time any male storms were christened. It says it discounted Katrina and Audrey as outliers, but it should have discounted everything before 1979.
Bigger samples are usually better in statistics, but this is one instance where it made the entire thing less credible. In my mind, including storms before 1979 is roughly similar to comparing men and women on eating habits when your samples consist of 25 men found in the mall food court and 75 women, 25 of whom were also found in the food court and 50 of whom were found in a women's gym down the street and then declaring women eat healthier than men. You can't get your samples from unequal places and consider your results sound, particularly when there are obvious reasons that the subjects in one place are likely to produce drastically different data than those in another.
In the latter decades, a really bad hurricane had a 50/50 chance at being named a female name because every other hurricane was given a female name. Before 1979, all hurricanes were female, hence the number difference of 75 to 25 in the analogy above; these researchers are drawing from data where female hurricanes outnumber male ones roughly 3 to 1 (depending on how many hurricanes actually occurred each year). Statistics has ways of dealing with differences in sample size in 2 compared groups, but generally it is still better to avoid large discrepancies; the methods don't eliminate the effects of the differences, they just minimize it. Still, I will let that slide for now. What I will not let slide is the differences in where the information is from.
Think about 1950 for a second. TVs were black and white and by no means something everyone had. Cell phones were the stuff of science fiction and telephones were often party lines, which meant you could only use the phone if none of your neighbors were doing so already. Radios were a common method of obtaining news. Meteorology has also gotten much better in the last 60 years. According to Wikipedia (humor me here) besides the naming of hurricanes, 1950 brought the first successful numerical weather prediction experiment; really, we were just getting started. It isn't until the 1970s that radars are really standardized and organized into networks. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) was also established in 1970. Doppler weather radar didn't become common until after 1980 meaning that before then we didn't really know how fast a storm was traveling; that is kind of a big deal. Now digital satellite, radar, and surface observations are analyzed to predict storm patterns. A lot has changed.
So let's line up this information regarding technological advancements with hurricane naming practices. We have 29 years of female hurricanes and then 33 years of half male and half female hurricanes. We have 20-30 years of very little radar use that aligns with the 29 years of all female hurricanes. Then, 1-10 years after male names begin to be used, we finally started widely using technology that tells us how fast a storm is going. In other words, most male names have been given out after Doppler radar and most female names (that 50 versus the 25) were given out before. Add to that the significant advancements in being able to communicate with the general public, and what we have is roughly 2/3 of the female hurricanes coming from an era where it is quite logical to assume more people would die in a hurricane than now and all of the male names coming from an era where technological advances hopefully minimize deaths.
Not convinced? How about this handy comparison of two hurricanes, Audrey in 1957 (the death toll of which can't be entirely determined but is somewhere between 300 and 700 from the figures I have seen) and Rita in 2005 (note both female hurricanes). "Rita hit the same region of coast with weaker winds (Category 3, 115 mph), but a storm surge even higher (15 feet). Rita destroyed virtually 100% of Cameron, whereas Audrey destroyed 75% of the town. Nearly two years later, Cameron is mostly just concrete slabs and trailers, thanks to Rita. However, Rita caused only one direct death in Southwest Louisiana--a drowning in Lake Charles. The answer is preparedness. Rita was a massive Category 5 hurricane several days before landfall, giving people plenty of time to receive the warnings and evacuate. Warning systems are much better now than in 1957, and Cameron was deserted when Rita hit." To be entirely fair, Audrey formed ridiculously fast, so even today the death toll would likely be higher than Rita, which as the quote points out, gave plenty of warning (though arguably some of that warning was due to better weather tracking). Also, it is important to note that Rita came just after Katrina in 2005; with that devastation fresh in the nation's mind, lack of respect for a hurricane was not really a problem. Still, the difference here was likely the ability to prepare--be it because of more time or more technology--not the lack of respect for a female name versus a male one.
Still not convinced? Okay, we will go about this a different (and simpler) way. This article addresses the falling number of fatalities due to hurricanes in the US. The sharp increase in 2000-2010 is pretty much entirely due to Katrina, by far the deadliest hurricane during these six decades, which even the original study declared an outlier. This table shows the breakdown by year, which showed me two things: first we are generally talking about not really all that many people in the grand scheme of things which means statistical analysis is greatly affected by small variations and second, we are really making progress in dealing with hurricanes.
No, none of this proves that sexism does not play a role in how seriously people take hurricanes, but I would say that it does cast reasonable doubt upon the conclusions made by a poorly designed statistical analysis. As seems to always be the case on this blog, the lesson is one of logic; while statistics are a great tool, it takes logic to use them correctly and logic to determine if another individual has used them correctly. In this case, logic seems to have been entirely missing from the analysis. It does make for an entertaining article though.
I get that it is popular to find sexism in everything, but that is no excuse for publishing garbage science. Or presenting such a misleading headline. The study just found that female hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes when comparing 2 very unequal sample groups and that when asked about hypothetical hurricanes, people tended to estimate that ones with male names were more devastating. We will discuss the hypothetical storms first.
People consider hypothetical storms with female names less threatening than hypothetical storms with male names. I concede that I may just not be understanding what they did, but from the description in the article, it seems like they just asked people how threatening different storms sounded to them and how likely they would be to evacuate if Hurricane Danny (or Hurricane Debby) was on its way (I borrowed these names from the actual 6 year rotating list you can find here. I don't know if the study used these names, but they probably should have). Apparently people said the female storms were less threatening.
Okay, if this is indeed what they did, all they did was prove that people found female names less threatening (which may be sexist, but it still has nothing to do with hurricanes). They did nothing to show that people actually behaved differently as a result of these names. If you asked me how dangerous I thought an imaginary hurricane was I would have to base my answer on the limited information given me, which seems to be mostly a name; this study found that people perceive male names as more dangerous. If you asked me how dangerous I perceived a real hurricane is I would base my answer on pretty much all the information but the name. In a study room with no real threat, I may be perfectly content to base my assessment of the imaginary off of completely arbitrary things like my dislike of that kid Dean in my 3rd grade class; hey, I decide who I am rooting for in sports that way all the time. In real life, I would never base a decision about evacuating entirely on a name.
Maybe I am alone in this and other people regularly decide whether to risk their lives based on something completely unrelated to the problem at hand. Still, I don't accept that finding that people assess female names that they happen to be told are hurricanes as less threatening than male names they happen to be told are hurricanes as proof that naming a storm after a girl makes it more likely to kill people. There is just a bit too much of a leap there for me. Of course, if you could compare real male and female storms and control for all other variables (besides the name) and you found female storms were significantly more deadly, then you might have something.
So, without further ado, we move on to the study's comparison of male and female storms.
"Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning 1950 and 2012. Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the female-named hurricanes produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities."
So let me get this straight: you took a period of 62 years, took only the 47 most devastating hurricanes (which is a bit of a suspiciously random number by the way. I guess the results were less interesting if they used the top 50), and then used it to determine that people are sexist when it comes to hurricanes. Of course, for the first 29 years, they only gave out female names, so any differences could just as easily be credited to advancements in life-saving technology by the time any male storms were christened. It says it discounted Katrina and Audrey as outliers, but it should have discounted everything before 1979.
Bigger samples are usually better in statistics, but this is one instance where it made the entire thing less credible. In my mind, including storms before 1979 is roughly similar to comparing men and women on eating habits when your samples consist of 25 men found in the mall food court and 75 women, 25 of whom were also found in the food court and 50 of whom were found in a women's gym down the street and then declaring women eat healthier than men. You can't get your samples from unequal places and consider your results sound, particularly when there are obvious reasons that the subjects in one place are likely to produce drastically different data than those in another.
In the latter decades, a really bad hurricane had a 50/50 chance at being named a female name because every other hurricane was given a female name. Before 1979, all hurricanes were female, hence the number difference of 75 to 25 in the analogy above; these researchers are drawing from data where female hurricanes outnumber male ones roughly 3 to 1 (depending on how many hurricanes actually occurred each year). Statistics has ways of dealing with differences in sample size in 2 compared groups, but generally it is still better to avoid large discrepancies; the methods don't eliminate the effects of the differences, they just minimize it. Still, I will let that slide for now. What I will not let slide is the differences in where the information is from.
Think about 1950 for a second. TVs were black and white and by no means something everyone had. Cell phones were the stuff of science fiction and telephones were often party lines, which meant you could only use the phone if none of your neighbors were doing so already. Radios were a common method of obtaining news. Meteorology has also gotten much better in the last 60 years. According to Wikipedia (humor me here) besides the naming of hurricanes, 1950 brought the first successful numerical weather prediction experiment; really, we were just getting started. It isn't until the 1970s that radars are really standardized and organized into networks. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) was also established in 1970. Doppler weather radar didn't become common until after 1980 meaning that before then we didn't really know how fast a storm was traveling; that is kind of a big deal. Now digital satellite, radar, and surface observations are analyzed to predict storm patterns. A lot has changed.
So let's line up this information regarding technological advancements with hurricane naming practices. We have 29 years of female hurricanes and then 33 years of half male and half female hurricanes. We have 20-30 years of very little radar use that aligns with the 29 years of all female hurricanes. Then, 1-10 years after male names begin to be used, we finally started widely using technology that tells us how fast a storm is going. In other words, most male names have been given out after Doppler radar and most female names (that 50 versus the 25) were given out before. Add to that the significant advancements in being able to communicate with the general public, and what we have is roughly 2/3 of the female hurricanes coming from an era where it is quite logical to assume more people would die in a hurricane than now and all of the male names coming from an era where technological advances hopefully minimize deaths.
Not convinced? How about this handy comparison of two hurricanes, Audrey in 1957 (the death toll of which can't be entirely determined but is somewhere between 300 and 700 from the figures I have seen) and Rita in 2005 (note both female hurricanes). "Rita hit the same region of coast with weaker winds (Category 3, 115 mph), but a storm surge even higher (15 feet). Rita destroyed virtually 100% of Cameron, whereas Audrey destroyed 75% of the town. Nearly two years later, Cameron is mostly just concrete slabs and trailers, thanks to Rita. However, Rita caused only one direct death in Southwest Louisiana--a drowning in Lake Charles. The answer is preparedness. Rita was a massive Category 5 hurricane several days before landfall, giving people plenty of time to receive the warnings and evacuate. Warning systems are much better now than in 1957, and Cameron was deserted when Rita hit." To be entirely fair, Audrey formed ridiculously fast, so even today the death toll would likely be higher than Rita, which as the quote points out, gave plenty of warning (though arguably some of that warning was due to better weather tracking). Also, it is important to note that Rita came just after Katrina in 2005; with that devastation fresh in the nation's mind, lack of respect for a hurricane was not really a problem. Still, the difference here was likely the ability to prepare--be it because of more time or more technology--not the lack of respect for a female name versus a male one.
Still not convinced? Okay, we will go about this a different (and simpler) way. This article addresses the falling number of fatalities due to hurricanes in the US. The sharp increase in 2000-2010 is pretty much entirely due to Katrina, by far the deadliest hurricane during these six decades, which even the original study declared an outlier. This table shows the breakdown by year, which showed me two things: first we are generally talking about not really all that many people in the grand scheme of things which means statistical analysis is greatly affected by small variations and second, we are really making progress in dealing with hurricanes.
No, none of this proves that sexism does not play a role in how seriously people take hurricanes, but I would say that it does cast reasonable doubt upon the conclusions made by a poorly designed statistical analysis. As seems to always be the case on this blog, the lesson is one of logic; while statistics are a great tool, it takes logic to use them correctly and logic to determine if another individual has used them correctly. In this case, logic seems to have been entirely missing from the analysis. It does make for an entertaining article though.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Living "Chemical Free": Something that Both Concerns and Baffles Me
I, like many, have a pinterest account. I was on pinterest one day when I came across a pin linking to an article about cleaning your house "without chemicals." I found this intriguing. Given that everything in this world that is a substance of any kind is in fact a chemical, I wanted to know how to clean something without using anything, except maybe willpower and magic.
The article was a bit disappointing. It included a list of different ways to clean stuff without the use of store-bought cleaners. Their favorite substitute was vinegar. I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but vinegar is a chemical. As a mater of fact, it's primary ingredient is acetic acid, also known as CH3COOH.
In all seriousness, I do get what the article was going for; I understand why it would be desirable to have household cleaners that pose the smallest health risk possible, and something that is perfectly okay to use in recipes is also probably perfectly okay to accidentally eat off of a counter due to residue or inhale (though in the case of vinegar my nostrils may beg to differ). Furthermore, I probably won't have to call poison control if I catch my kid drinking it.
That said, I also won't be making a switch any time soon. For one thing, vinegar stinks. For another, I worked as a custodian on my college campus for 4 years to help pay for school and became well versed in how to clean efficiently. We did in fact use vinegar at work, and as such I know its strengths and limitations well. I am not content to scrub something with vinegar when I know I could get the same thing cleaner in less than half the time using something else. I learned early in my custodial career that the trick to safe cleaning is to make sure you are using (and storing) cleaners properly much more than it is making sure everything you use is edible.
Still, I am perfectly fine with someone using primarily vinegar on their own house. You can clean your house with mud for all I care. But there is still something about this all that does concern me, and it is actually one specific logical fallacy.
Natural is Best
For some reason, there is a prevailing belief in our society that what is natural is what is best and by that reasoning what is not natural is therefore bad. This applies to everything from cleaning supplies to behavior, from medicine to clothing. Unfortunately, this is a logical fallacy known in logicians terms as the "appeal to nature." I see this fallacy almost everywhere and have certainly seen a pretty penny made off of marketing it. The rest of today's post will be dedicated to some of the ways I see this fallacy appear, but this is by no means a complete list. It is merely the ones that come to mind right now. So without further ado (we have already had too many paragraphs of ado) and in no particular order, I give you three common uses of the appeal to nature.
Animals do/don't do it so it must be good/bad.
For some reason, animal behavior is sometimes used to justify or condemn human behavior, something I cannot for the life of me understand. I am not a dog (or dolphin, chimpanzee, or platypus), so why should I use this animal as a model for my behavior?
I have been told that I shouldn't drink cows milk because we are the only animal that drinks milk after being weaned and it is therefore unnatural. Apart from the fact that this statement is false (a large number of animals--cats come to mind--will drink the milk of other animals if they can get it), animals display a large number of habits I don't wish to take part in. We are also the only animal that cooks chicken before we eat it, but I don't plan on giving that up. My Dad was once told that a certain behavior (I can't remember for the life of me what it was) was desirable because someone's dog did it; my Dad quickly pointed out that dogs also eat their own vomit. It is possible that drinking cows milk is bad for you (though no one has convinced me yet) and that whatever behavior this dog exhibited is desirable, but the fact that animals do or do not do something is not relevant to determining the value of that thing.
It's an herbal remedy so it is safer than medicine.
This one actually concerns me a fair deal because there are so many people who buy into it and there is considerable risk if you take it too far. The basic idea is that anything you buy in a pharmacy is bad for you, so you should instead use teas, oils, salts, etc. to take away your ills.
I am all for not drugging yourself up unnecessarily. I took Percocet after removal of my appendix and had the weirdest, most unsettling dreams of my life. Consequently, I have refused prescriptions for narcotic painkillers both after having my wisdom teeth removed and after giving birth, though I took a few doses before leaving the hospital with the second. I was also on a medication for a period of time that made me extremely irritable and generally unpleasant to be around. I once took this knock-off of a popular cold medicine and felt like I was groggy and floating for about 24 hours. I totally get why people would want to avoid drugs; they can do scary things to you.
So why do I have a problem with "natural" remedies? It is really quite simple: they are still a drug, but so many people don't think of them that way. While it is true that you probably won't have hallucinogenic dreams from most things you can buy in a store food section, there is still a possibility of side effects. When you start to buy these remedies other places, who knows what is really in them. And frankly, I feel much safer taking something that I can look up studies on than something some lady swears by at a farmers market. You are still medicating yourself. I am not totally against using natural remedies, in fact, my favorite cold medicine is actually an herbal remedy. I am, however, against using these remedies as a medicine "alternative." Just because it hasn't gone through the regulation system of the FDA as a drug does not mean that it isn't one. By all means, use your teas to fix what ails you, just make sure you do your research just like you would with any other drug. And if you are using multiple "natural" remedies multiple times a day, consider if you really need to drug yourself that much.
It only includes ingredients found in nature so it must be good for you.
For some reason, many people think that just because something grows or exists on its own it is better for you than something that has to be manufactured.
I really wish I didn't have to point this out because I feel like this should be obvious to anyone who has thought about this idea at all, but here it is: there are actually a lot of really harmful substances that grow naturally. There are a large number of plants that will kill you if you eat them and quite a few that will give you quite the rash if you so much as touch them. Many hallucinogenics grow in nature, but I hardly think that makes them healthy. Furthermore, just because something is manufactured does not inherently make it a hazard to your health. In fact, many things we have been able to manufacture have increased life expectancy which, while not equivalent to health does suggest that a substance won't kill us, which is obviously better than some plants.
Conclusion
I am not against natural things. I have used home remedies and I rarely buy boxed snacks. What I am against is assuming that because you can place the label "natural" on something it is necessarily the best and because something doesn't occur naturally it is necessarily inferior.
The article was a bit disappointing. It included a list of different ways to clean stuff without the use of store-bought cleaners. Their favorite substitute was vinegar. I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but vinegar is a chemical. As a mater of fact, it's primary ingredient is acetic acid, also known as CH3COOH.
In all seriousness, I do get what the article was going for; I understand why it would be desirable to have household cleaners that pose the smallest health risk possible, and something that is perfectly okay to use in recipes is also probably perfectly okay to accidentally eat off of a counter due to residue or inhale (though in the case of vinegar my nostrils may beg to differ). Furthermore, I probably won't have to call poison control if I catch my kid drinking it.
That said, I also won't be making a switch any time soon. For one thing, vinegar stinks. For another, I worked as a custodian on my college campus for 4 years to help pay for school and became well versed in how to clean efficiently. We did in fact use vinegar at work, and as such I know its strengths and limitations well. I am not content to scrub something with vinegar when I know I could get the same thing cleaner in less than half the time using something else. I learned early in my custodial career that the trick to safe cleaning is to make sure you are using (and storing) cleaners properly much more than it is making sure everything you use is edible.
Still, I am perfectly fine with someone using primarily vinegar on their own house. You can clean your house with mud for all I care. But there is still something about this all that does concern me, and it is actually one specific logical fallacy.
Natural is Best
For some reason, there is a prevailing belief in our society that what is natural is what is best and by that reasoning what is not natural is therefore bad. This applies to everything from cleaning supplies to behavior, from medicine to clothing. Unfortunately, this is a logical fallacy known in logicians terms as the "appeal to nature." I see this fallacy almost everywhere and have certainly seen a pretty penny made off of marketing it. The rest of today's post will be dedicated to some of the ways I see this fallacy appear, but this is by no means a complete list. It is merely the ones that come to mind right now. So without further ado (we have already had too many paragraphs of ado) and in no particular order, I give you three common uses of the appeal to nature.
Animals do/don't do it so it must be good/bad.
For some reason, animal behavior is sometimes used to justify or condemn human behavior, something I cannot for the life of me understand. I am not a dog (or dolphin, chimpanzee, or platypus), so why should I use this animal as a model for my behavior?
I have been told that I shouldn't drink cows milk because we are the only animal that drinks milk after being weaned and it is therefore unnatural. Apart from the fact that this statement is false (a large number of animals--cats come to mind--will drink the milk of other animals if they can get it), animals display a large number of habits I don't wish to take part in. We are also the only animal that cooks chicken before we eat it, but I don't plan on giving that up. My Dad was once told that a certain behavior (I can't remember for the life of me what it was) was desirable because someone's dog did it; my Dad quickly pointed out that dogs also eat their own vomit. It is possible that drinking cows milk is bad for you (though no one has convinced me yet) and that whatever behavior this dog exhibited is desirable, but the fact that animals do or do not do something is not relevant to determining the value of that thing.
It's an herbal remedy so it is safer than medicine.
This one actually concerns me a fair deal because there are so many people who buy into it and there is considerable risk if you take it too far. The basic idea is that anything you buy in a pharmacy is bad for you, so you should instead use teas, oils, salts, etc. to take away your ills.
I am all for not drugging yourself up unnecessarily. I took Percocet after removal of my appendix and had the weirdest, most unsettling dreams of my life. Consequently, I have refused prescriptions for narcotic painkillers both after having my wisdom teeth removed and after giving birth, though I took a few doses before leaving the hospital with the second. I was also on a medication for a period of time that made me extremely irritable and generally unpleasant to be around. I once took this knock-off of a popular cold medicine and felt like I was groggy and floating for about 24 hours. I totally get why people would want to avoid drugs; they can do scary things to you.
So why do I have a problem with "natural" remedies? It is really quite simple: they are still a drug, but so many people don't think of them that way. While it is true that you probably won't have hallucinogenic dreams from most things you can buy in a store food section, there is still a possibility of side effects. When you start to buy these remedies other places, who knows what is really in them. And frankly, I feel much safer taking something that I can look up studies on than something some lady swears by at a farmers market. You are still medicating yourself. I am not totally against using natural remedies, in fact, my favorite cold medicine is actually an herbal remedy. I am, however, against using these remedies as a medicine "alternative." Just because it hasn't gone through the regulation system of the FDA as a drug does not mean that it isn't one. By all means, use your teas to fix what ails you, just make sure you do your research just like you would with any other drug. And if you are using multiple "natural" remedies multiple times a day, consider if you really need to drug yourself that much.
It only includes ingredients found in nature so it must be good for you.
For some reason, many people think that just because something grows or exists on its own it is better for you than something that has to be manufactured.
I really wish I didn't have to point this out because I feel like this should be obvious to anyone who has thought about this idea at all, but here it is: there are actually a lot of really harmful substances that grow naturally. There are a large number of plants that will kill you if you eat them and quite a few that will give you quite the rash if you so much as touch them. Many hallucinogenics grow in nature, but I hardly think that makes them healthy. Furthermore, just because something is manufactured does not inherently make it a hazard to your health. In fact, many things we have been able to manufacture have increased life expectancy which, while not equivalent to health does suggest that a substance won't kill us, which is obviously better than some plants.
Conclusion
I am not against natural things. I have used home remedies and I rarely buy boxed snacks. What I am against is assuming that because you can place the label "natural" on something it is necessarily the best and because something doesn't occur naturally it is necessarily inferior.
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