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.
