Stuff White People Like #54: Natural Medicine

[semillama]

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/59-natural-medicine/

"Since white people can’t really blame any race for their problems, they need to blame corporations. In this case, the reason that they are sick or fat or without energy is because the drug companies are in a conspiracy to keep them addicted to placebos. This helps them shed accountability, and it lets them feel like they are helping the environment by rejecting the polluting, greedy, awful drug companies and taking natural, organic medicine from the earth.

But perhaps it goes deeper. Hundreds of years ago, another group of people believed firmly in natural medicine and it’s ability to cure disease. Then white people gave them blankets with small pox and they all died. So perhaps turning to natural medicine also helps white people feel better about killing natives."

The rest of the blog is just as funny, but this post was so appropriate to this forum.

[Warpy]

1. AAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHH!

"Then white people gave them blankets with small pox and they all died."

How long is it going to take for this myth to die? Those blankets might have been covered with all sorts of nasty bacterial spores, but the smallpox virus doesn't live on surfaces even in very controlled conditions for more than a few hours! That's how the WHO was able to eradicate it save for samples growing on human tissue cultures here and in Russia.

Spoiled the whole damn article for me.

90% of Indians were dead of disease after first contact across the country. Mostly, they died of things the Europeans survived, like measles and typhus, diseases of crowding. Others died of TB. Only those exposed to people already sick with smallpox contracted it.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Are you sure about that?

Smallpox spreads from person to person, primarily by droplet nuclei or aerosols expelled from the oropharynx of infected persons and by direct contact. Contaminated clothing or bed linens can also spread the virus.
...
A number of outbreaks have occurred in laundry workers who handled linens and blankets used by patients.
...
Standard precautions using gloves, gowns, and masks should be observed. All laundry and waste should be placed in biohazard bags and autoclaved before being laundered or incinerated. A special protocol should be developed for decontaminating rooms after they are vacated by patients (see "Decontamination" section).

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/281/22/2127

That article takes the spread by infected blankets seriously. Autoclaving is more than just 'wait for a few hours - the virus will have died after that'.

[salvorhardin]

3. I'm not sure about how long smallpox can live on just blankets

But the idea that the Army used smallpox infested blankets to deliberately spread smallpox amongst the Mandan Indians does seem to be a myth, and originally an outright fabrication by our old friend Ward Churchill:

Did the U.S. Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indians?
Fabrication and Falsification in Ward Churchill’s Genocide Rhetoric.
Brown, T. (2006).
Plagiary: Cross‐Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification, 1 (9): 1–30

Ward Churchill tells a shocking tale of war crimes committed by the U.S. Army at Fort Clark against the Mandan Indians in 1837. Fort Clark stood perched on a windswept bluff overlooking the Missouri River, in what is today North Dakota. Churchill reports that in early 1837, the commander of Fort Clark ordered a boatload of blankets shipped from a military smallpox infirmary in St. Louis. When the shipment arrived at Fort Clark on June 20, U.S. Army officers requested a parlay with Mandan Indians who lived next to the fort. At the parlay, army officers distributed the smallpox‐infested blankets as gifts. When the Indians began to show signs of the illness, U.S. Army doctors did not impose quarantine, but instead told the Indians to scatter, so that the disease would become more widespread and kill more Indians. Meanwhile, the fort authorities hoarded smallpox vaccine in their storeroom, instead of using it to inoculate the Indians.

Every aspect of Churchill’s tale is fabricated. Between 1994 and 2003, Ward Churchill published at least six different versions of this accusation against the U.S. Army. While the Mandans and other Indians of the Upper Plains did suffer horribly from a smallpox epidemic in 1837, Churchill presents no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the infection was anything but accidental, or that the U.S. Army was in any way involved. Fort Clark was a privately owned fur trading outpost, not a military base, and there were no U.S. troops in the vicinity. The closest U.S. military unit was an eight hundred mile march away at Fort Leavenworth.

In telling his fantastic tale, Churchill has fabricated incidents that never occurred and individuals who never existed. Churchill falsified the sources that he cited in support of his tale, and repeatedly concealed evidence in his possession that disconfirms his version of events.
More: http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:to9aeplLvSsJ:www.plagiary.org/smallpox-blankets.pdf+smallpox+blankets+myth&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
PDF: http://www.plagiary.org/smallpox-blankets.pdf

[WoodrowFan]

5. smallpox myth

I covered this is my class last term. There were a handful of attempts (mostly by the British pre-1800) to use smallpox-exposed blankets to spread disease but they seemed to have failed. Smallpox, the flu, measles, tb, etc, were most often spread by accident from initial contacts from western sailors with additional contact coming from Europeans (and African slaves) during periods of conquest.

Ironically, it was probably inevitable. The Spanish could have been so non-imperialistic as to make the modern Quakers look like Spartans but once contact between western and eastern populations had been made diseases were bound to be spread. It was a simple case of populations that were virgin soil to a whole host of diseases being exposed over a relatively short period of time to a large number of nasty germs. If the story were reversed and it was the Americans that sailed across the Atlantic first and made contact the same thing would have happened.

This does NOT excuse the Spanish and other European imperialistic states from moving in and taking over the Americas or from their use of warfare to wipe out as many native Americans as they did, but the epidemics were neither intentional nor something for which any party can be blamed.

[salvorhardin]

6. Oh, I agree

The imperialism is deplorable and not excused in any way. However, spreading bad history (or outright fabricating it as Ward Churchill seems to have done) is also deplorable, whether it's intentional or not. There's no equating imperialism with bad history or fabrication, but it doesn't help us to understand the past to repeat myths.

[Warpy]

7. The one instance in which this is alleged to have occurred

was during a war against one tribe. There were people with smallpox inside the fort, and they tossed linens taken directly from their beds onto the Indians below.

That would have done it.

The virus is an extremely fragile one and lives only a few hours outside the human body. The linen precautions above were because the virus can live inside wet sputum and secretions a little longer than it lives on surfaces.

However, it would not still be alive on a shipment of trade blankets carried for many days in a wagon or on a boat to any remote tribe, which is how the story is generally told.

[cosmik debris]

4. It's all academic

They did just as well with sexually transmitted diseases, and they are more fun to spread.

[Heddi]

8. i agree and I disagree with this

The population I serve in the hospital has a large Hispanic and Native American percentage.

Many patients who are members of these two groups tend to use homeopathic and naturopathic medicine and treatments more than the "white" folks I care for.

It can be especially frustrating when you're explaining to a patient that their disease will not be cured based on whether or not they eat a "hot" or "cold" meal...I don't mean "hot" or "cold" as in spice or temperature--there are cultural beliefs that say certain foods and food combinations treat X diseases and disorders while others treat Y diseases and disorders.

I have had patients who refuse to take medications prescribed by doctors, or at least until the medicines are given the once over by a tribal elder or mythical person who cures things (but this same person cannot cure cancer, or CHF, or diabetes....). Or you have patients who want the Dr to meet with the magical mytical curing person before any treatments are begun, no matter how life-saving they are.

Because many of the patients and families I care for come from Mexico, and there are many medications that are not FDA approved that these folks use willy-nilly without any understanding or appreciation of the deleterious effects. We had one lady come in and bring in THREE GROCERY BAGS of medicines from Mexico. I had to transcribe all of the names and send them to the pharmacy and there were so many that the pharmacist was like "I have NO idea what this is or what it's used for". The patient doesn't know why it's used other than some Wise Person Who Cures Things told them to take this medicine. Other medications had been banned in the US because of dangers, and yet others were being used completely against any sense of medical advice--large, large doses of Estrogen-conguate hormones for really no apparent reasons. Doses that we would probably SUE a doctor for giving a patient, but this woman had been taking for unknown years and for unknown reasons.

It's very difficult and I'm sure there are people reading this thread screaming XENOPHOBEEE!!11!! but that's not the case. I have no problem with cultures and language and nuances. But I do have a problem with people who put more faith into Holy Shamen than they do the doctors who they CHOOSE to visit when an emergency arises---you trust the Dr enough to admit you to the hospital, but you need Shaman's permission before you take a heart medicine, or get emergency surgery, even though Shaman would have you eat Thistle Root for your GI bleed (rather than give you massive blood transfusions), and that Shaman has 2 teeth and an education roughly equiavlent to that of a 3rd grader, and who thinks that a good side of hot chili powder can cure anything that ails ya.....

[chicagomd]

9. That blog

is total shit.

I don't like Mos Def at all, I only like 2 or 3 lawyers, and I am not a big fan of the whole "Hating their parents" thing.

I do love me some irony, however.

[varkam]

10. Hey, Mos Def has some good songs.

:D

[semillama]

11. well, maybe you're not totally white.

I don't like sushi at all, for example.

[chicagomd]

12. My wife,

who is latin, would argue that point with you.

[semillama]

13. Just tell her you don't like Mos Def.

:D

[NMMNG]

14. Well, that's 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back

Dumb ass blog.