Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

[hobbes]

...in your back garden.

More yawnsome twattery from auntie beeb

[Wyatt Earp]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

... although they weren't clinical trials, their feedback was really interesting...

Was it. Was it really.

[Andy C]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

Ooh, I'm sure that's exactly what it was.

[hobbes]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

"Only two people grew an extra head."

[WOM]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

You skeptics. Read this:

[Another favourite is] a pillow containing ingredients traditionally used to reduce anxiety and aid restful sleep.

And the secret ingredients? "It's just hops and lavender..."

There's something to that. Any time I've loaded up on beer and bedded a geriatric prostitute, I sleep like a log.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

It must be a great life being a BBC TV producer. Pick a subject, any subject - ooh, let's say, growing lavender in your back garden - then work out how you can commission a show that involves you jetting around the world for several months to places like Tuscany, Malaysia, downtown Mexico City and Buenos Aires, to discover that - amazingly ! - people around the world grow lavender in their back gardens, too, and having grown it, even use it for things!

I want them to commission me for a 6-part series on how people all around the world tackle the problem of feeding their cats. From tuna in porcelain bowls in Buckinghamshire, to scraps of waterbuffalo served up in mini wicker baskets in Vietnam, you simply won't believe the myriad of traditional, and ethnic, ways, people feed their moggies around the globe!

[WOM]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

I dare you to write an outline and fire it off to them. I'd put even odds on it getting picked up. Number of cat people (multiplied by) interest in foreign destinations (plus) other cat people and their cats (equals) ratings smash.

[Wyatt Earp]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

WornOldMotorbike wrote:

... bedded a geriatric prostitute...

That one went by me. Does Wayne Rooney come into it?

[Brandenburger Toro]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

I don't know that there's anything particularly egregious about this. He's not "doubting" science, far from it, and he's explicitly not claiming anything like the status of clinical trials for this stuff. He's saying, look, here are some things down the back of your garden that have been used for thousands of years in the absence of modern medicine, and contain some of the same active ingredients.

That's an explicit appeal to normal scientific/medical causality, a clear appreciation of the limits of anecdata, and a fairly clear statement of the contexts where This Sort Of Thing is and isn't useful, compared to a prescription and a trip to the pharmacy.

Pass.

[Wyatt Earp]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

But what are clinical trials for? They're for finding out whether "drugs" have any effect beyond placebo. That's all. There's nothing poncy about them, necessarily. It's just that without them, his "quite interesting" results mean nothing at all, and I don't agree that he seems to appreciate that. He seems to see clinical trials as a kind of nice, icing-on-the-cake thing to have, rather than something you need to do if you want to distinguish your "drug" from snake oil.

The programme title doesn't help, and I accept that your man probably didn't write that.

[diggedy derek]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

The reference to his "in depth knowledge of how to use them" is pushing the truth a little, for me.

[Ginger Yellow]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

It's unfortunate wording. "In depth knowledge of how they are used" would be accurate.

I'm in two minds about this. Ethnobotany is very interesting in its own right, and undoubtedly there are remedies/active ingredients that modern science hasn't gotten round to testing yet, especially for conditions that aren't very profitable to treat in the West. But there's a distinct whiff of "pharmaceuticals bad/nature good" about the whole endeavour. There doesn't seem to be any attempt to assess whether these remedies are more effective/have fewer side effects than "real" drugs, and there's a lot of waffly bollocks like this:

At the very least, adds James, most of the ingredients in the soup are quite nutrient-rich, and when your immune system is compromised, it can be a good food supplement to take when you are feeling under the weather.

No it can't. It's not a food supplement. It's food.

[Wyatt Earp]

Annoyingly, this isn't about making smack...

Yeah, what GY said.