Humans evolved to live in a rich soup of microscopic life.  Our recent efforts to sterilize our surroundings and innards are anti-scientific silliness.  But keep in mind that you really don’t want the practice of medicine to be scientific – medical science is great in the lab and all, but when you do science in the doctor’s office you end up with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or some similar atrocity – real medical science requires control groups and you don’t want your kid to get placebos instead of antibiotics if she’s got scarlet fever.

True Believers will object to most of what I just said, but fundamentally the practice of medicine is an art or a craft, not a science.  And that’s a good thing.

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me, based on the linked article, whether the process was sufficiently different from that employed in my small-minority thyroid medication* as to be reflexively dismissed.

Which is why I asked, “Why are you so certain?.” 

I didn’t – and wouldn’t – say, “We can’t be certain.” :-)

—

* Armour (TM) Desiccated Thyroid. (I’m just glad I can get it again – it was unavailable for a while, and single-ingredient synthetic thyroxine left me rather unwell. Small minority?  Yep, that’s me. :-) Story of my life.)

I am not saying this is definitely bullshit, but neither do I know if it is true.  I notice that in the 6 months since this story originally ran (and was on boingboing at that time too), there has been zero followup.  No new reports, nada.  In my mind, this is still entirely in the “who knows what’s really going on” category.

If the BBC reported that the US Customs and Border Patrol had announced that they were going to step up enforcement against smuggling of dry baby pills from Mexico, I think our bullshit detectors would be going off.  And we would not be talking about wtf why are mexicans eating babies.

oops, sorry, was typing same time as you. 

You can’t see from the above that the process used is not comparable to your parallel, because what they are doing is using babies and third trimester foetusus, all of it, as soon after death as possible. They don’t dessicate in the way you would prepare a porcine thyroid gland (the only part you are prescribed BTW if you are among the very small minority not using the synthesized thyroxine), instead they chop up the body (all of it) and use small stoves to dry, then crush to powder foregoing binders, and pour into gelatin capsules.

Essentially they end up cooking & drying instead of just drying. The only possible benefit would be trace nutritive if you ingested a whack of them, since they mix the cooked/dried parts before crushing to powder. 

They aren’t doing this based on any traditional Chinese medicine practice, or any other cultural practice, except the universal cultural practice of selling rarity ascribed with wondrous properties, cancer patients are a segment of their customer base in SK, along with the people buying it for “stamina” and regenerative  sexual prowess. Capitalizing on the weakened and desperate, same as it ever was.

Cory is spot on with his assessment, though it isn’t entirely supported in the article linked.

edit – cause I don’t think it’s that big a deal, that it’s a bit sensationalized, from what I read they’ve only intercepted 20,000? pills, which is probably around 20kg of baby sans water, so like a few hundred babies is my now stretched guess, because I don’t know how much babies weigh when dried.

I’m not joking, or relying on anyone’s lack of understanding.  

I ingest tablets of freeze-dried powdered compressed pig parts prescribed by my MD.  They make a HUGE difference in my health, in all sorts of ways.   It’s standard mainstream Western medicine.  Tons of scientific evidence.

So I don’t see any show-stoppers in your list.  Ingested? Yep.  Powdered? Yep. Now, my pig-part pills are from a specific part of the pig, but that’s hardly conclusive by itself. (Which pieces of the fetus are used?  Do you know? I don’t.)

I’m certainly not saying these pills ARE beneficial, mind you.

I’m just saying it’s easy to see how they MIGHT be – how powdered human fetus might have some actual biological effect that might possibly benefit some unwell people – even if the effects aren’t quite as dramatic or wide-ranging as my powdered pig pills.

And that it’s not hard for me to understand how someone might suspect (or even believe) such a thing, given parallels like my pig pills, without them necessarily being “credulous dunces.”

Anyway, I wouldn’t dismiss such suspicions out-of-hand without at least some further investigation, but maybe I just don’t know whatever it is that other people know that makes them so certain.

Which is why I asked, “What makes you so certain….?”

I think it’s a fair question.

I don’t dig the industry behind it though

After all, Komodo Dragons can reproduce via parthenogenesis, and what evidence do we really have that Mary (and all her forebears of virgin birth myth) was not a Komodo Dragon?

Ingested? 

Now can you think of half a dozen reasons why that would not have any benefit, because if not I call into question your ability to think of half a dozen reasons why it might have any non-placebic beneficial medicinal properties.

How about just one, non-placebic reason that has more “maybe” and less or equal potential for harm than an equal amount of nothing at all?

edit- I get you were joking, sometimes I forget how it is kind of funny the way that quacks and freaks peddle the same sort of uncertainty you use as the basis of your joke to promote anti-vaccine, homeopathy and other frauds.

pro-med-sci – “Vaccines hold potential risk, but not in the manner you say, to the extent you say, and the risk is a tiny fraction of the definitive, historically documented scourge of disease left unchecked.

anti-vac – “Oh really, and you think you understand all that medical/history mumbo-jumbo?”

pro-med-sci “Yes.”

anti-vac “AHA! BUT YOU SEE, I CAN’T!”

pro-med-sci “I can help you with that, here is some literature, information etc”

anti-vac “Are you seriously asking me to question what I believe?”

Perhaps they’re not “rip-off artists” selling to “credulous dunces”, but, rather, believers in folk medicine supplying other believers.

Whether there’s any scientific support for the belief in this particular folk medicine is largely irrelevant. If the pill makers are themselves believers, they might very well (and quite rightly) regard selling their customers sugar pills as indefensible fraud.

You already assume the pills are conscious fraud, so you don’t understand what difference the actual ingredient would make.  

But even if it is conscious fraud, using sugar would be proof positive of fraudulent intent, would it not?

So maybe they’re true believers. Or maybe they’re just smarter about minimizing legal liability than you are. :-)

(And BTW, how certain are you that human fetal or neonatal tissue has no beneficial medicinal properties? I can think of half a dozen reasons why it might, just off the top of my head.  I confess I haven’t seen any studies, but then, this is the first I’ve heard of it.)

The thing I don’t get is why the rip-off artists who sell these things don’t just fill the tablets with sugar and say they’re full of powdered baby. It’s not like the credulous dunces buying the stuff will be able to tell the difference, and surely sugar is easier to get hold of.

They are True Believers, Cory.  You are one too, but you happen to believe in different memes, so these seem nonsensical to you.