The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 275 No 7365 p292
3 September 2005

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Taking a cool view of alternative remedies more
The peril of the pavement: avoiding the cracks more
Problem of arsenic in well water persists in West Bengal more
Mindless entertainment more

Taking a cool view of alternative remedies

Many people are suspicious, often with justification, of drugs and preparations prescribed for them when they consult a GP. Believing, rightly or wrongly, that the prescribed medicines are either ineffective or hazardous, they turn to self-medication with products of which they read or hear and which they may obtain either among general merchandise in a supermarket or over the counter from a health store or pharmacy.

However, doubt has recently been expressed about whether practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine observe sufficient protection of the patient. According to a report in Nature for 18 August, a survey of 95 British organisations dealing with alternative and complementary remedies revealed that few practitioners in the field monitor the unwanted side effects of their products.

Edzard Ernst, who is professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School of the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth, asked the organisations in May whether they advise their members to report adverse effects, but fewer than one third replied, and of those only nine replied that they advised their members to report side effects.

One association concerned with acupuncture detailed the adverse reactions reported during 2004. There seems to have been a lack of familiarity with the concept of adverse reactions, and several organisations commented that such effects, though encountered in mainstream medicine, were not visualised in their own practice.

Despite this strange belief, serious unwanted reactions, such as stroke after chiropractic treatment, are known to occur. A spokesperson from the British Medical Association has commented that more regulation is called for, although the chairman of the British Complementary Medicine Association does not believe that reflexology or chiropractic can induce harmful reactions. On the other hand, the president of the Scottish Institute of Reflexology believes that practitioners of complementary medicine should adopt the same standards as those of conventional medicine, and the institute intends to introduce a yellow-card scheme for recording reactions.

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The peril of the pavement: avoiding the cracks

The other day, as I passed a group of children engaged in a strange ritual, I was reminded of the long established custom of avoiding treading on the cracks of a pavement when walking along it. And I became painfully mindful of the fact that, without giving it a conscious thought, I still took care to place my feet on the paving stones and never on the dividing lines.

It must be decades since I was indoctrinated in the superstition of crack avoidance, but its traces, apparently, persist to this day.

In their book ‘A dictionary of superstitions’ (1989), Iona Opie and Moira Tatem note that crack avoidance is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating from about 1890.

In Cardiff in 1910 treading on a crack would result in one’s marrying a negro and producing a black baby. The notion of having a black baby if you broke the taboo applied also in Aberystwyth in 1953.

In Kennington it was said that placing one’s foot on the crack brought ill fortune. Alternatively, it was claimed that such an incident would turn one’s mother black.

For girls in Aberdeen the number of lines they trod on indicated the number of their mother’s best china dishes they would break.

In 1924 a poem by A. A. Milne, “Lines and squares”, told of masses of bears waiting at street corners “all ready to eat / The sillies who tread on the lines in the street.”

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Problem of arsenic in well water persists in West Bengal

A comment in Nature for 21 July gives a worrying insight into the persistent drinking water problem that has afflicted the population of West Bengal and Bangladesh for several years. Since the early 1990s outbreaks of skin diseases and cancer have been attributed to the high concentration of arsenic in local water drawn from wells and used for drinking and irrigation of crops (PJ, 30 August 2003, p276 PDF (75K)).

The wells were dug by aid agencies to protect the residents against the bacteriological hazards of rain and river water, before it became known that the local rocks were rich in arsenical ores. Although several thousand arsenic removal plants were installed to meet the challenge, they have since proved to be ineffective.

Experts working in Calcutta recently carried out tests of the efficacy of 18 purification plants obtained from 11 different manufacturers in India, Germany and the US. The results of a two-year survey showed average arsenic levels of 26µ per litre, more than twice the maximum safe value recommended by the World Health Organization. Only two purification plants met the Indian standard value, and 80 per cent of the local villagers tested had abnormally high concentrations of urinary arsenic.

An Indian epidemiologist concerned with the investigation has suggested that efforts should now concentrate on harnessing and purifying surface waters and not drawing water from wells.

Rainwater, if it can be collected and stored without contamination, would be a far safer alternative source of drinking water than well water.

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And I quote …

Mindless entertainment
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set."
— Raymond Thornton Chandler, writer (1888–1959).

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