Category Archives: Alternative Medicine

The DRIPBaR is excited to announce the opening of their newest location in Clarksville, TN

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (PRWEB) October 12, 2022

The DRIPBaR is excited to announce the opening of its newest location in Clarksville, TN on October 16, 2022. The franchise has approximately 500+ additional locations in the pipeline.

Longtime locals Joel and April Gochberg, own and operate The DRIPBaR Clarksville. They are excited to bring new alternative therapies to the community and are passionate about the idea behind wellness-boosting IV infusions. April, a Board Certified Naturopathic Doctor (BCND) is well-known throughout the community and has owned the nearby Healthwise Naturopathic Clinic for the last eight years.

Customers will have a variety of IV Lifestyle Drips and IV Health Support Drips to choose from, including the popular Powerpack and Allstar drips, as well as Halotherapy, an Infrared Sauna, and more. All of these services are designed to help customers look and feel their very best whether they are looking for a quick boost or a more long-term wellness solution.

For those who don't have time for a full vitamin infusion but want the benefit, clients can choose one of five IM Quick Shots that give the body a boost in just five minutes!

Designed to offer quick doses of powerful and optimally-balanced nutrients and formulas, The DRIPBaRs infusions are popular for boosting energy, hydrating, detoxing from chemicals and toxins, improving overall health and vitality, and addressing more specific wellness needs.

To celebrate their arrival, The DRIPBaR Clarksville is offering a FREE B-12 shot with the first appointment or 50% off the first drip if you become a member on your first visit when an appointment is booked before opening day. Appointments can be booked here.

About The DRIPBaRFounded in 2016 and franchised since late 2019, The DRIPBaR is a nationwide-based franchise focused on helping people obtain their best physical and mental health using intravenous therapies.

Through advances in cellular and biological science, The DRIPBaR helps clients fight the consequences of chronic illness, address the effects of aging, and achieve a balanced wellness. With a focus on ever-evolving treatments and medical advancements, the franchise hopes to shorten the gap between concierge and treatment-based medicine. For more information, visit http://www.thedripbar.com.

The DRIPBaR Clarksville130 Alfredo Dr 3AClarksville, TN 37042

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The DRIPBaR is Coming to Clarksville, TN on Oct 16, 2022 - PR Web

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In February 2021, as the new vaccines that would tame the Covid pandemic were being released to the general public, an article sourced to an osteopath in Cape Coral, Florida, claimed that the vaccines were a medical fraud and did not counter the disease. The shots, it said, alter your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch.

The man pushing these false statements was Joseph Mercola, a pioneer of the anti-vaccination movement, who had a history of Covid denialism, having asserted that there was no pandemic and that Covid was a scam. As he pushed falsehoods about the vaccines, the FDA sent him a warning letter for promoting unapproved and unproven treatments for Covidsuch as a vitamin C, vitamin D, and other productsin possible violation of federal law. In a report released in March 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate assigned Mercola the top spot on its Disinformation Dozen list of people responsible for the bulk of anti-vaxx content shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter. A few months later, the New York Times cited the centers report and dubbed Mercola the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, noting he had posted over 600 articles on Facebook that cast doubt on Covid-19 vaccines and had reached a far larger audience than other vaccine skeptics, with his claims echoing across Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. (In an email toMother Jones, Mercola maintained the Disinformation Dozen paper was a fake report tied directly into dark money politics and was debunked by Facebook, was not a peer reviewed primary reference, and was not validated in any way.)

Yet a few years earlier, Dr. Mehmet Oz, now the Republican candidate for US Senate in Pennsylvania, had validated Mercola and boosted his audience, helping this anti-vaxx crusader expand his ability to disseminate false and possibly dangerous information.

In 2009, after Oz had appeared on Oprah Winfreys talk show dozens of times, Winfrey set him up with a syndicated television show of his own on which he covered assorted health issues. It was a success. But four years later, in a lengthy profile of Oz, New Yorkerreporter Michael Specter noted that Oz had consistently booked guests with dubious authority to challenge conventional medicine. That included Mercola, who had quit practicing as a doctor to run a highly profitable business selling alternative health products and dietary supplements. The FDA had warned Mercola for making false claims about products that supposedly combat cancer and heart disease. And he had a rather spotty record in other ways. He had claimed avian influenza was a hoax, contended that vaccines are dangerous and cause AIDS, and promoted an Italian doctor who said cancer is a fungus that can be treated with baking soda. (In 2018, this doctor was sentenced to five and a half years in prison on a manslaughter charge for treating a brain cancer patient with this supposed remedy.) Yet Oz vouched for Mercola, hailing him as a pioneer in holistic treatments and a person your doctor doesnt want you to listen to, a man who is challenging everything you think you know about traditional medicine and prescription drugs.

In an odd comment to Specter, Oz said, If I dont have Mercola on my show, I have thrown away the biggest opportunity I have been given.

Oz has long come under fire for championing unproven therapies and productsin other words, quack nostrumson his show. During a 2014 appearance before a Senate committee, then-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) lambasted him for hawking miracle and magic weight-loss cures: You know its not true. So why, when you have this amazing megaphone, do you cheapen your show like that? That same year, a British medical journal released a report saying that no evidence could be found for about a third of the medical recommendations Oz had presented on his show.

In questioning Ozs boosting of quackery, his critics have pointed to his embrace of Mercola, who in 2017 filed an affidavit saying he was worth over $100 million. In 2011, Steven Novella, the founder of Science-Based Medicine, a website and blog that takes a dim view of alternative medicine and seeks to expose medical scams, lashed out at Oz for his relationship with Mercola:

Oz has recently gone beyond coyly flirting with pseudoscience by directly promoting Joseph Mercolaa notorious internet doctor who himself promotes all sorts of pseudoscience and fear-mongering on his website. In an interview on his show, Dr. Oz praises Mercola while refraining from directly mentioning any of the more controversial positions that he takes [T]he information on Mercolas website is not science-based. Mercola frequently engages in rank fear-mongeringpromoting every preliminary study that may suggest a possible connection as if it were a proven health risk.

I have been most critical of Mercola for his anti-vaccine stance. He recently joined with anti-vaccine activist Rosemary Fischerto attack the flu vaccine. Last year he was warning his readers away from the H1N1 vaccine citing fears that it would cause an epidemic of Guillaine-Barre Syndrome (GBS). This epidemic never appeareddespite active monitoring, there were no excess cases of GBS due to the H1N1 vaccine. Mercola never bothered to correct his prior fear-mongering. He just went on to the next onewarning his readers about a connection between vaccines and narcolepsy. However this fear did not hold up to replication either.In short, in my opinion Mercola is a dangerous medical crank.

Novella argued that Mercolas website does have a body count. He has scared readers away from vaccination, a proven safe and effective preventive measure. And he slammed Oz hard: If there were any doubt as to the intellectual integrity and scientific legitimacy of Dr. Oz as a media doctor, he has erased all doubt with this interview of Mercola It was, if anything, shameless promotion.

In a 2013, commentary assailing Oz in Science, which is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Derek Lowe zeroed in on Ozs connection to Mercola, noting Mercolas website is a trackless fever swamp of craziness.

In 2014, Steven Salzberg, a professor of biomedical engineering and computer science at Johns Hopkins University and a columnist for Forbes, penned a similar critique of Ozs promotion of Mercola:

Why has Dr. Oz repeatedly had Joe Mercola on his show? This is a tough one. Does Oz believe that autism is caused by vaccines, something Mercola has claimed repeatedly over the years? Does he understand that Mercolas anti-vaccination campaign leads to genuine harm? Does he know that the FDA has repeatedly issued warnings to Mercolato demand that he stop making false claims about his vitamins and supplements, asChicago Magazinereported?

Or does Dr. Oz keep inviting Mercola back because he knows Mercola has a big audience that will increase his own viewership?

Salzberg noted that by booking Mercola on his show, Oz is giving him free publicity And whether or not Oz agrees with Mercola, he is helping to give credibility to Mercolas wildly inaccurate and dangerous anti-vaccine claims.

Asked by Mother Jones about this criticism he has received, Mercola did not address the specific remarks and replied, My response to the name-calling is that our healthcare system is a disaster because of extreme pharmaceutical corruption. The industry influences politicians and media alike. Big Pharma will do anything to prevent change as Americans continue to suffer through horrific guidance from the government, which is deep in the pockets of industrial agriculture and the drug industry.

With Mercolas standing as an anti-vaxxer well in place before Covidand his status as a health advocate legitimized by Ozhe was well-positioned to become a leading purveyor of misinformation that could dissuade people from obtaining the Covid vaccination. Mercola is a master of capitalizing on periods of uncertainty, like the pandemic, Kolina Koltai, a University of Washington researcher who studies online conspiracy theories told theNew YorkTimes.Mercola told the newspaper that criticisms of him were political.

The Oz campaign did not reply to emails with questions regarding his relationship with Mercola.

In emails to Mother Jones, Mercola noted that he had no personal or business relationship with Dr. Oz. He also defended his promotion of vitamin D as a natural remedy for Covid, asserting it is scientifically proven. He said, I dont promote any products; I simply share clinical research studies supporting nutritional and health benefits. The FDA was asked for a meeting to discuss their [warning] letter, and they never followed up with me. He claimed that the FDA and the National Institutes of Health are both responsible for the development and leak of this virus. Mercola contended that the federal government and major media have lied to American public repeatedly about Covid (particularly regarding vaccines and mask-wearing) and are completely corrupted by the pharmaceutical companies. He maintained, Vaccine passports will be leveraged to roll out a long planned digital identification system combined with digital currencies; it will allow for complete control of transactions based on compliance and behavior.

In the opening months of the Covid pandemic, Oz, whom Trump in 2018 appointed to a federal council on sports, fitness, and nutrition, took actions considered counterproductive by many in the public health community. On Fox News, he suggested reopening schools because doing so may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality. After this comment drew widespread criticism, Oz said, I misspoke. Moreover, he repeatedly touted using hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid, though experts noted the drug was unproven in addressing the coronavirus. According to theNew York Times, Oz promoted chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in more than 25 appearances on Fox in March and April 2020. (Last month, CNBC reported that Oz and his wife own shares in two pharmaceutical companies that supply hydroxychloroquine.) When one study found that Covid patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die than untreated patients, Oz stopped promoting the drug.Eventually hydroxychloroquine was shown to not yield any benefit in the treatment of Covid.

With his cheerleading for hydroxychloroquine, Oz helped distort the national public conversation about Covid. But his greater impact on the pandemic might be his previous support for Mercola. Advancing the career of the fellow who would become a top promoter of Covid misinformationand whose efforts may have prompted many Americans to not become vaccinated and, thus, face terrible consequenceshardly meets the oath that Oz once swore: first, do no harm.

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How Dr. Oz Boosted an Osteopath Who Became a Top Spreader of Covid Misinformation Mother Jones - Mother Jones

More women than men are affected by arthritis. Worldwide, 18.0% women and 9.6% men above age 60 have symptomatic osteoarthritis (OA). Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is four to five times higher in women than in men at age below fifty, and two times higher at age above sixty. Also, osteoarthritis pain in women is usually more severe than in men.

In India also OA is more common in women than in men. Seventy percent of India women above age 65 have radiological evidence of OA.

Reasons for higher risk of arthritis in women

Exact reasons for higher prevalence of arthritis in women is not known. The likely contributing factors are:

Symptoms

More than one hundred types of arthritis are known. Signs and symptoms vary with the type of arthritis but may include:

Diagnosis

Diagnosis is made from symptoms and clinical evaluation and from:

Treatment

Exercises and physical therapy may strengthen the muscles surrounding the joints and may improve range of movement of the joint. Splints or braces may also help. If these measures do not help, then one of the following surgeries may be used:

Alternative medicine

Alternative medicine such as Acupuncture, fish oil supplements, Chondroitin and Glucosamine may help. But no scientific evidence to support that.

Foods

No scientific evidence that foods can reduce symptoms of arthritis. But it may help to avoid certain foods, and to eat certain foods.

Foods to avoid:

Foods to include:

Conclusion

Arthritis has no cure. It adversely affects quality of life. It can make it difficult to use hands and arms, to do daily tasks, to walk easily, to sit erect. It affects posture by misalignment and misshaping of joints. It has crippled many a life around the world.

To reduce the risk of arthritis, achieve and maintain correct weight, do thirty-forty minutes of moderate exercise five-six days a week, do Yoga, tai chi, and take relaxing massage. These measures will strengthen the muscles and keep the joints lithe and working.

Finally, as Stephanie Walters says, nobody can take away your pain, but dont let pain take away your happiness

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

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World Arthritis Day: Arthritis and Women - Times of India

Alternative medicine refers to unproven or disproven methods used instead of standard medical treatments to prevent, diagnose, or treat cancer. They have either not been thoroughly tested in clinical trials, or they have been tested and found not to work against cancer. Some examples of alternative methods include special diets, certain supplements and herbs, high doses of vitamins, homeopathy, laetrile, and Rife machines. Many alternative medicine providers suggest a combination of these types of treatments.

Standard treatments are based on research studies that show that the treatment is safe and effective against one or more types of cancer. There are also standard treatments to help with many of the side effects of cancer and cancer treatment. Examples of standard treatments include surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, targeted therapy, hormonal therapy, and supportive medicines to help with pain, nausea, or other problems.

Alternative medicine is different from complementary therapies. Complementary methods are used along with and support standard treatments. Alternative methods are used instead of standard treatments.

Treatments that are not used in mainstream medicine may be described as unconventional, non-conventional, and non-traditional by mainstream medical doctors. These terms may be used to describe any complementary or alternative therapy. Some treatments, such as traditional Chinese medicine or Native American healing, are also used in complementary or alternative therapies. Of course, to the person who is part of the culture practicing these treatments, their native methods are usually called traditional, while Western medicine is the non-traditional way.

People with cancer might think about using alternative methods for a number of reasons:

Some alternative methods may be appealing because they use your own body andmind, or things found in nature. Some even promise wellness using methods that sound simple, natural, and without side effects, which is rarely true of standard cancer treatments.

While some alternative methods rarely cause harm, others can have dangerous or even life-threatening side effects. Even when there are few harms with a particular alternative treatment, research has shown that people who use alternative methods instead of conventional cancer treatment for the most common curable cancers have a greater risk of dying from their cancer.

By definition, alternative methods have not been studied enough to show that they are effective in treating cancer, or they have been studied and shown to not be effective. Methods that are proven by research to effectively fight cancer tend to be used in standard medicine fairly quickly.

The decision to use alternative methods is an important one, and its yours to make. We have put together some suggestions to help you think through the issues and make the most informed and safest decision possible.

There tends to be much less high-quality, objective information about alternative methods than about mainstream treatments. This is one of the reasons that it is sometimes impossible to say much about whether an alternative method is likely to help you, or even how safe it might be. This is why you should try to learn as much as you can about each treatment before you use it. Even if some information isnt available, the limits of what is known can help you make your decision.

The choice to use alternative methods is yours. You can use them more safely if you:

You can find more information about specific types of alternative medicine on the National Cancer Institute website.

Originally posted here:

What Is Alternative Medicine? - American Cancer Society

Herbal medicines or supplements are natural compounds from plants leaves, bark, roots, seeds, or flowers that people can use for medicinal purposes. They may offer therapeutic benefits when people use them as complementary medicine.

Herbal medicines contain active ingredients from natural plants. Their use dates back thousands of years, even before the invention of conventional medicine.

While many people prefer herbal medicines to some doctor-prescribed medications, others may use them in combination with prescription and nonprescription drugs.

This article outlines the different types of herbal medicines, their uses, safety precautions, and when to contact a doctor.

Herbal medicines are natural botanical products, derived from plants, that people may use to treat and prevent diseases.

They are part of a category of treatments called complementary and alternative medicine. Currently, thousands of herbal medicine products are available over the counter in the United States.

Research from a 2018 focus-group study suggests that people may use herbal medicine because they are dissatisfied with conventional medicine. They may also use herbal medicines to:

Other common uses include:

However, a 2017 report published in the Journal of Patient Experience notes that factors associated with the use of herbal medicine include:

The World Health Organization estimates that 88% of countries use herbal medicine, noting that 40% of pharmaceutical drugs and landmark medications, including aspirin and artemisinin, originated from herbal medicine.

Learn about nine herbs for anxiety.

How a person takes herbal supplements depends on the form. They are available as tablets, capsules, teas, powders, extracts, and fresh or dried plants.

A person can take herbal supplements by:

Dosages for some herbal supplements may be challenging to get right. Many factors can affect the quality of herbal supplements, including the growing conditions, age, and preparation of the plant.

As a result, there is no standardized way to provide a correct dosage. If a person considers taking an herbal supplement, they should avoid self-prescribing and discuss it with a doctor first.

The doctor will ask questions about a persons health condition and determine the best dosage for the desired pharmacological effect.

Because conventional medical doctors may not have received much education regarding herbal medicine, a person may instead want to consult a licensed naturopathic doctor, a licensed acupuncturist, or another qualified practitioner of herbal medicine.

A person should talk with a doctor before taking herbal medicine. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health warns that supplements can increase or decrease the effects and side effects of prescription and OTC drugs. Doctors can advise people about drug interactions they need to be careful of.

Safe use of herbal medicine also includes:

The United Kingdoms National Health Service (NHS) notes that taking herbal medicine may not be suitable for a person if they are:

The NHS also notes that anyone taking herbal medicine should disclose it to their doctor before surgery. This is because some herbal medicines may interact with anesthesia drugs and affect blood pressure and blood clotting during and after surgery.

Some people use herbal supplements to treat specific symptoms, though there is not much formal research on these uses. The table below lists some herbal supplements and some conditions that they may benefit.

Using supplements can be unsafe for people who have certain health conditions or take medications. People who are breastfeeding or pregnant may want to avoid herbal supplements, as there is very little research on their effects.

Always consult a doctor before taking herbal supplements.

Learn about eight herbs and supplements for depression.

No, the FDA does not approve herbal medicines. This is because the FDA does not consider herbal medicines drugs. Instead, it considers them dietary supplements for complementary therapy.

As a result, herbal medicines are not subject to the same testing, labeling, and manufacturing standards as traditional prescription and OTC medications. However, the FDA regulates herbal medicines to ensure that they meet specific criteria and that they are not dangerous for human consumption.

Not necessarily. The NHS warns that natural does not mean safe if a person uses a product without a doctors prescription.

This is because some herbs can have adverse drug interactions with other medications. Some may also cause fatal side effects. A person should always check with a doctor before taking supplements if they have a health condition or are taking prescribed medication.

A person should discontinue using an herbal supplement and contact a doctor immediately if they experience any of the following symptoms:

They should also seek medical advice if they take an overdose of an herbal supplement.

If a person develops symptoms of a severe allergic reaction, they or other people around them should immediately call 911 or the local emergency number.

According to a 2017 review published in American Family Physician, 4060% of U.S. adults use dietary supplements, including herbal medicines, and 25% report taking herbal supplements with prescription medication.

The authors note that many people who use herbal supplements do not disclose it to their doctors. This affects the clinical assessment and safety of specific herbal supplement-drug interactions.

To help healthcare professionals better evaluate herbal supplement interactions in the body, a person should:

Herbal medicines or supplements are natural compounds made from plant parts. Manufacturers extract active ingredients from the plants leaves, bark, roots, seeds, or flowers.

Herbal supplements are available in many forms, such as pills, teas, extracts, and powders. People use them to treat chronic conditions, including anxiety, sleep problems, and low libido.

Herbal supplements are not FDA-approved, and some natural products may be unsafe. Herbal supplements can cause adverse drug reactions, so a person must consult a doctor before taking them if they are also taking prescription medication.

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Herbal medicine: Types, uses, and safety - Medical News Today

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Orange Park, Florida--(Newsfile Corp. - October 5, 2022) - WCI Health LLC ("WCI Health" or the "Company"), an alternative health and wellness company created to address the misconceptions and lies surrounding medicinal herbs like psilocybin (magic mushrooms), cannabis and other plant-based supplements, and its subsidiary, WCI Health University, the intersection of psychedelics and science education for caregivers will be a vendor and presenter at Wonderland Miami Conference by Microdose on NOVEMBER 05, 2022 on KETAMINE FOR PAIN AND DEPRESSION: From Randomized Clinical Trials to Real Life Evidence.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mental illness has become a big problem both in the United States and growing globally. Over 300 million people suffer from depression before the COVID-19 pandemic. One-third of depression sufferers are resistant to current conventional therapy. 6-9% of the population suffers from PTSD. At least 35 million people suffer from substance abuse issues. Over 1.2 billion people are suffering from various ailments treatable with plant medicine like psilocybin and Cannabis. A recent Phase 3 trial by MAPS shows that patients experienced remission from depression for up to a year after a dose of psilocybin. But without education and awareness, patients' and insurance companies' acceptance of these treatment modalities might as well be a "dream" considering how long misinformation has been spreading about psychedelics and cannabis as medicine.

WCI Health & WCI Health University's objective is to bring alternative health and wellness options to people through our quality plant-based products and educational programs. Our series of podcasts and videos highlight the advantages of using Functional Mushrooms, Adaptogens, CBD, cannabinoid products, and other medicinal herbs for your health and well-being.

Our highly skilled clinical pharmacist, Doctor Lola Ohonba, Pharm.D. presents lectures & consultations that are easy to understand about alternative therapies ideal for her clients. Dr. Lola, like many of her clients, knows what it means to live with pain and debilitating ailment. She lives with a physical disability and has successfully learned effective ways to manage the residual pain and discomfort resulting from this condition. She uses her knowledge of plant medicine deeply rooted in her indigenous heritage growing up in West Africa (Nigeria) around the ancient cultures, practices & traditions passed down from generation to generation. As a pharmacist and herbalist, you're bound to get the best of both worlds with Dr. Lola.

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About WCI HEALTH (Alternative Health & Wellness Hub)

WCI Health is an alternative health and wellness company created to address the misconceptions and disinformation surrounding medicinal herbs like psilocybin (magic mushrooms), cannabis, and other entheogens. WCI health specializes in providing quality plant-based supplements, adaptogens, and evidence-based education and events where you learn how to get and stay well using the healing power of plant medicines, adaptogens, and other wellness tools; thereby saving money on healthcare costs and living a stress-free life. WCI Health provides services that are tailored to clients' needs including, health and wellness coaching, corporate staff training, and brand awareness. Growth is a major key to business success. At WCI health, our focus is to help our partners succeed. We leverage our access as a global thought leader on all platforms, partnership with Cannabis Radio, social media presence, and our Cannabis-Psychedelic focused podcast to help you gain visibility, brand awareness, and ultimately exponential growth.

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Dr. Lola Ohonba, Pharm.D. Founder/CEO731-616-2771 [emailprotected]

About Wonderland by Microdose Psychedelic Insights

Wonderland Miami will offer the industry a unique in-person convergence of business, science, music, and emerging technologies. The event is a thought-leadership platform and an opportunity to connect with influential leaders in science, policy, and business. It will also act as a launching pad for innovative content connected to the psychedelic medicine space, providing compelling entertainment and collaboration opportunities for attendees.

About Microdose Psychedelics Insights

Microdose Psychedelic Insights is your guide to the psychedelic medicine industry. With a vision to shift the world's perception of psychedelic medicine, we distribute and create the most compelling content, financial analysis, engaging events, and groundbreaking education to drive the psychedelics industry to the forefront of modern medicine.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/139194

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WCI Health LLC, Your Alternative Health and Wellness Hub Will Be a Vendor and Presenter at Wonderland Miami by Microdose - StreetInsider.com

During the Covid pandemic, I watched as several close friends were lost down the dark rabbit hole of Covid conspiracy theory. These are not the right-wing types who you read about in the mainstream news. One of these friends, lets call her Molly, is a brilliant and progressive scholar. Her theoretically rich writings have won book awards. She is a talented teacher. She supports the unhoused, immigrant communities, and racial equity. How is it possible that during the pandemic she began to believe that that there is a consistent them, a cabal of global and national elites, perhaps a deep state, who, through lockdowns, mandatory masking, and vaccination requirements, are enacting an international program to marginalize and control us? Why would she believe that vaccinations spread Covid rather than prevent its worst symptoms, or that Covid-19 might not be a real disease?

Molly does not follow the usual right-wing suspects like QAnon or Alex Joness InfoWars. I dont believe she thinks that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax or that pedophiles are abusing children in the basement of a pizza restaurant. Rather, she is deeply skeptical of biomedicine and the state. She follows the websites and blogs of alternative medicine portals like GreenMedInfo, a website run by Sayer Ji, an alternative medicine advocate who, according the McGill Office for Science and Society, curates the scientific literature with his bachelors degree in philosophy, or Joseph Mercola, an osteopath and natural health website personality who has been named one of the disinformation dozen and the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online. These sites are what commentator Farhad Manjoo terms the wellness-conspiracy industrial complex, a complex of sites and blogs that are staggeringly profitable from selling alternative remedies. My conspiratorially minded friends have directed me to other sites supporting alternate Covid realities, including Ask the Experts (Covid-19 Vaccine) on Brand New Tube, Techno-Tyranny: How the US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus to Fulfill an Orwellian Vision on the Last American Vagabond, and Ground Control to Planet Lockdown: This Is Only a Test from the Strategic Culture Foundation. These friends trust the clinicians, researchers, and health experts on QuestioningCovid.com before they would believe Helen Chu at the University of Washingtons Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network. Molly considers her neighbors who get their news from the New York Times dupes, and she feels disgust when they try to argue against her. Though she is not a Trump voter, I have my own fears that her perspectives overlap with ones that will allow for Trumps return to power, transforming the United States government in authoritarian, even fascist, ways. She thinks that I am the one blinded to the truth of a powerful coordinated elite who plan to take away my liberties through fascist methods. It has become difficult for Molly and me to talk about anything except trivialities. What happened to our shared sense of reality?

You might disdain Molly or want to call her deplorable. I am interested in exploring a different way of thinking about the situation, however. Were she a conservative living in a deep red state, that would be one kind of problem. What it means for a well-educated and progressive member of the academy, a coastal elite, to adopt Covid conspiracy theories so readily is a problem I cannot easily dismiss. Covid brought Molly into contact with a world that matched well with herindeed, with many of ourprofessional training. Both a capacity for deep independent research, these days undertaken on the internet rather than through face-to-face interviews or ethnographic field work, and a critical hermeneutic of suspicion that says the world is never quite as it appears, combined to leave her susceptible to the alternate realities of Covid conspiracies. I have these same skills and training. Maybe you do too. You think this dive into unreality couldnt happen to youIm not so sure. Didnt many of us not long ago confidently assert in the linguistic turn that the world was created entirely through language and discourse? With enough time to do our own research and few boundaries around the vectors critique can take, one might end up joining a great derangement rather than exposing hidden truths. Isnt it awfully easy to lose sight of the real?

Viral worlds are a key site from which to explore questions of the real. The real is often understood to be epistemologically associated with the visible. Yet, viruses are unseens, meaning they are not accessible to unaided visual perception, proprioception, or interoception. Existing at the edges of our technical capacity to enhance sight, virologists need to make an imaginative leap between the structures they can see with an electron microscope and what they know from theories of chemical interaction. Viruses were identified later than the bacteria in microbial history when, in 1879, Martinus Beijerinck filtered a residue from plants sick with tobacco mosaic disease and discovered it could infect healthy plants. He gave the substance the name virus. The newness of our limited knowledge of the virosphere (the sum-total of viral genomic diversity) cannot be overstated; most knowledge of the immense numerical abundance and functional magnitude of viruses has occurred only in the past two decades (this is especially true of the viruses beneficial contributions to life on earth). The viruses that create human illness can be known from their effects, but sickness often spreads unevenly among populations, so some will become ill while others will not, and some will die while others are spared. Throughout history, people have sought explanations, many of them spiritual or personally meaningful, for this unevenness. The invisible nature of viruses means that we are left dependent upon the power of secular reason, the tools and techniques of scientific inquiry, and experts and expertise to identify them and find their reality credible. Without these tools, we are susceptible to believing in occult forces. In populations already suspicious of science and skeptical of where elite interests lie, the reality of imperceptible viruses, their effects, and appropriate responses to infection are left open to doubt and disbelief.

Across the interpretive social sciences, cultural studies, and post-structuralist scholarship, the idea that there is, or can ever be, a real has been called into question and stigmatized as naive. In place of a real, we have described the world as socially constructed. Until very recently, there was the sense that material objects (like viruses), which are not made by society, are uninteresting, while social objects, like gender, medicine, time, or capitalism, are not stable, singular, or transparentin short, not real. The value of a social constructionist viewpoint is that, if phenomena exist in society and not in the world, perhaps we can change the things we dont like. Socially constructed worlds also allow us to appreciate human difference by denaturalizing social configurations: it is always possible to live otherwise. The idea that the world is socially configured, and that it can be deconstructed to illustrate its contingent nature, has been a particularly hopeful epistemology: it allowed us to believe that change was possible.

This way of thinking became compromised, however, once it was taken up by the forces of reaction and right-wing populism. What to make of it now, when voices on the right argue that climate change or Covid-19 are made upsocially constructedby a cadre of powerful elites who are out to control our bodies, minds, identities, and economies? That sounds a lot like arguments that, until very recently, were made on the critical left about the power of the right. In this world turned upside down, we have no choice but to rethink our attitudes toward the real so we might find a real that is neither naive nor simply social.

As it happens, a wide set of thinkers are doing just that through conceptual work that rethinks the real by reframing linkages between social and material worlds, by examining whether such linkages are necessary to make something real, and by combining social and material realms in new ways. Some of these thinkers are object-oriented, which makes them useful for thinking about viral objects. Graham Harman, for example, rejects Kants Copernican Revolution, which puts the knowing human at the center of the universe, reduces objects to artifacts of human cognition, and makes the real impossible to think. He rejects what are called philosophies of access, which privilege human access to objects over an objective world independent of mind. Harman and other object-oriented philosophers (like Quentin Meillassoux, Levi Bryant, and Jane Bennett) argue that there is a vibrant real that exists beyond human perception and cognitionthere is a world that is neither socially constructed nor made up of dead, inactive things. This might seem a mundane observation if you are a natural scientist, but it is in fact extraordinary if you are a philosopher who is curious about how we come to know what we think we know. Harman develops a phenomenology of objects to argue that objects encounter other objects in particular ways; entities affect other entities and create meaning with other objects. One of the ways Harman speculates on the existence of the real is by arguing that objects are never simply created or exhausted by their relations and can withdraw from relationality.

The Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpes Virus (EEHV) is an excellent example of the capacity of objects to enter into and withdraw from relations. The Herpesvirus represents itself to the body of elephants and to veterinarians as viremia in mild to acute expressions, but the Herpesvirus at other times will evade representation-as-symptom and withdraw. EEHV moves silently; it hides and reemerges, staying latent for many years, without the apparent awareness of elephants or zookeepers. Ursula Muenster and I coined the term viral creep to reflect the capacity of EEHV to emerge suddenly and to violently kill an elephant in a matter of hours, or just as readily to creep into the background for an individual or a population. Virologists who study this still do not know where latent EEHV resides in the elephant bodymaybe it is the heart, maybe the lung or nerve endings. Elephants can be similarly withdrawn. We can guess and imagine what makes them happy and whether it is possible for them to live meaningful lives deprived of their complex social and cultural relationships in close proximity to humans. But we do not know exactly what causes them stress, how stress is experienced and manifests in elephants bodies, or if stress alone is the reason for their new vulnerability to EEHV. EEHV and elephants have an existence and relations beyond human access, but they are still real. We should recognize that we cannot and will never know all there is to know about entities that withdraw, or which cannot be represented to mind.

Marcus Gabriel is another thinker exploring the real. Gabriel puts forth a both/and argument supporting what he terms new realism. In contrast with old realism in which there was a thing-in-itself independent of mind and which we could access only through the categories of the mind, in Gabriels new realism there exist both things in themselves and things that are real from a viewers perspective. Gabriels new realism has two principles: 1) reality is not a big thing that exists out there, it is fragmented, and 2) it is possible to know reality in itself. A human perspective on the real is one form of the real but does not obviate the simultaneous existence of a mind-independent real. Gabriel is interested in a world which is made up of various domains, all of which he says are real. Some domains, like viruses or the immune system, are the purview of the natural sciences, while othershe uses the example of the state of Germanyare not. His work is a challenge to physics and other sciences that seek a unified system of the real. For Gabriel, not all domains intersect or interact, though they are all real within a domain, what he calls a field of sense. Therefore, he argues that the world, or the whole in which all domains coherently come together either with or independently of human thought, does not exist. For Gabriel, what exists is everything else. This would include Covid conspiracies that are real inside their domain.

Another important point for Gabriel is that the real of the object-in-the-world does not determine phronesis, or how we should ethically and practically respond to its existence. In relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, he argues that what we know about the virus through the natural sciences is never going to be sufficient to justify human ethical decision-making; its not just a matter of believing in or following the science. There will always be a gap between scientific expertise and moral and political judgement. At the start of the Covid pandemic some things were known, like how to make an mRNA vaccine or how prior SARS coronaviruses had evolved and spread, but much was and still is unknown. We will never have so much information about objects in the world that we can avoid decisions about what to do with that information; scientific perspectives do not create all that is real. He terms the wish that scientific thinking and objectivity can or should replace political thinking in relation to the pandemic virocracy. Virocracy is not the way out from populism and its hatred of expertise, he argues. Just as Gabriel believes that things exist without our observation, we also cannot retreat to a world or a real that does not include humans and our actions as part of the real. New realists like Gabriel support neither immaterial constructivism nor naive scientism breaking the exclusionary bond between the material and the real.

Literary scholar Monika Kaup is another thinker who rejects setting the material reality of objects in opposition to the social in her work on apocalyptic fiction. We cannot separate the world from the mind, or vice versa, she argues, because our minds are part of reality. She writes that while mechanism is a reductionist realism, privileging matter, the phenomena of the natural sciences, and while non-material entities cannot be quantified, it does not follow that non-material entities are not real. How do we understand material entities like viruses without reducing reality to viral mono-causality, and without granting natural scientists the last word? How do we bring our minds into reality to reinvent a realism appropriate to our pandemic age? Kaup proposes what she calls contextual realism:

Contextual realisms reject classical concepts of the real such as objects, elementary parts, collections of things, the antithesis between appearance and (ultimate) reality, and the dichotomy between reality and construction. Their place is taken by a new relational set of concepts: relationships, pattern, organization, factishes, systems scale, emergent properties, fields, and so on.

Kaup pursues contextual realism through climate change and neuroscience. I argue viruses are also real within contexts.

For example, there is hardly any doubt that the transport of animals through globalized networks of exchange, human population increase and inhabitation of areas that were formerly left to wildlife, banal practices of global travel and trade, and intensive methods of the livestock revolution are responsible for much recent viral emergence and the expansion of zoonoses, some of pandemic proportions. Viruses like HIV, influenza (H1N1 and H5N1), and SARS-CoV-2 all have complex contexts for their emergence. With these zoonoses, many have looked to nature to explain their evolution as though the virus were an object out there waiting to get us in our separate human world. Wild birds have often been blamed as hosts for virulent influenzas, for example. Substantial research, however, has proven that highly pathogenic influenzas are not independent realities but contextual ones. In the industrial henhouse, antibiotic treatment begins at birth, and there is an ongoing struggle to keep up with evolving disease emergence. Poultry breathe in the ammonia from excrement, making their airways vulnerable to respiratory illness. Debeaking practices, dense populations, close confinement, noise, and heat add to their vulnerability. While the industrial sector attempts to keep disease out through biosecurity methods that maintain the flock in a sanitary bubble, the bubble often breaks down. Once infection occurs, a virus can rapidly passage through poultry bodies. Continually able to find new susceptible birds within a large industrial flock, virulence is not a liability for the virus, and increasingly virulent strains that mutate randomly can begin to thrive and multiply. New influenza strains evolve to be deadly through the contextual reality of confined animal feeding operations.

Conspiracies should also be understood as contextually real. Just as a highly pathogenic influenza needs the industrial henhouse for its reality, conspiracies surrounding Covid-19 have needed the contexts of international competition, political polarization, new internet and media platforms, and science skepticism to be real. The evolution and emergence of SARS-CoV-2 helps illustrate the contextual reality of Covid conspiracies. When SARS-CoV-2 first emerged, it was assumed to be a predictable spillover event, an instance where zoonotic diseases from wild animals adapts to infect human beings. The coronavirus would likely have evolved in the wild (perhaps in a pangolin), come to a market in Wuhan, China where wildlife was brought in from the countryside, and infected the population in a market via a super-spreader event. Nearly simultaneously, however, a different theory emerged claiming the virus had been accidentally or deliberately leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosecure laboratory that had been doing experiments on bat coronaviruses circulating in the wild. Eben Kirksey documents paranoid speculation about a lab-leak coming from Twitter, 4Chan, and Reddit threads early in the pandemic. While the precise conditions of SARS-CoV-2s evolution are still unknown and under study by reputable scholars and research teams, the lab-leak theory was also taken up by many who wanted to believe there was something sinister in Chinas involvement in the Covid outbreak.

The sinister version of the lab-leak story, that a leak was deliberate or was the result of some illicit experiments, was promoted by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo early in the pandemic, but the claim initially didnt gain momentum beyond the MAGA movement and a few anarcho-capitalist online forums because of its racist anti-Chinese overtones. Not long after this, according to Andrew Liu, right-wing media encouraged by internet trolls began to conceive that they were being illegitimately pushed to ignore the lab-leak theory by the mainstream media. That the politically correct left was resisting the theory helped convince the conspiracy-oriented right that the lab-leak must be real. Interestingly, a similar pathway to confidence in the lab leak developed on the other side of the political divide. Molly found the lab-leak theory credible because she believed we were diverted from the truth by forces that wanted us to think it was only a conspiracy. The lab-leakers have protected themselves, she told me, just the way Monsanto has with its herbicide glyphosate, by making us feel that criticism of its product is irrational. According to Molly, promoting the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy was a feint; the lab-leakers had insulated themselves from their mistakes or misdeeds by promoting their real actions as beyond belief. For both conservative and liberal believers, the context of the conspiratorially real was defined by who their enemies were. Liu writes that as of December 2021, 72 percent of Americans believed that SARS-CoV-2 had been leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Whether a laboratory leak was the source of the Covid-19 pandemic depends upon more than ones enemies, however. It also depends upon the emergent science that, at present, is tending to strongly favor evolution of the virus in the wild. Of the multiple productive sources of evidence for the natural evolution of SARS-CoV-2, some relate to the morphology of the virus, and others relate to the spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses from wildlife. On the one hand, for example, are the physical features of the virus that make it an efficient human pathogen. The fact that the virus binds so well to the human ACE2 receptor is mediated by the SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain of the viruss spike protein. Pangolin coronaviruses have an identical receptor binding domain to that found in SARS-CoV-2. This does not prove that the SARS-CoV-2 was a reassortment from a pangolin virus, but it does prove that the exceptional ability of SARS-CoV-2 to bind to human cells already exists in nature. On the other hand is the massive spillover risk of coronaviruses, the fact that we have seen similar spillover before with SARS, MERS, and other coronaviruses, and the fact that coronavirus strains in wildlife are massively under sampled. Sanchez et al., for example, estimate that there are sixty-seven thousand spillover events annually in Southeast Asia alone, and they site serological evidence of SARS-related coronavirus exposures in China including from people who claimed no contact with any kind of intermediate host.

That nature can create the morphology of efficient human coronaviruses, and that there is constant opportunity for mutation and recombination in proximity to human communities, has led Scripps microbiologist Kristian Andersen to claim that the likelihood of a lab leak is minuscule compared with the likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 resulting from the millions of wildlife encounters happening every year in the region. He says that

it is currently impossible to prove or disprove specific hypotheses of SARS-CoV-2 origin. However, while both lab and natural scenarios are possible, they are not equally likelyprecedence, data and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab-leak remains a speculative hypothesis based on conjecture.

Anderson was initially open to the possibility of the lab leak, but now finds it highly unlikely. We do not have the final word on the real of SARS-CoV-2 origins, but many independent researchers around the world are working on it. Critical skepticism alone based upon the identity of your opponents will not be sufficient to provide an answer. To believe in the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy theorist is to find the ongoing process of scientific inquiry of little relevance.

In forming a conspiratorial real, the natural sciences have become dismissible as a source of legitimate knowledge, and yet different models for science have been developed that help us move away from having to choose between an objective and a social real. Isabelle Stengers writes:

From the fact that experimental achievements happen, it can only be concluded that some ingredients of reality lend themselves to this demand. But, even then, their objective definition is strictly relative to the experimental conditions that enabled them to reliably answer the experimenters question. To take an example, the objective definition of genetically modified soybeans or cotton does not cover all what they will be able to become part of outside of the lab, in the fields or in living bodies.

In Stengerss mixture, there is an ingredient of reality, but the ingredient does not warrant the term objectivity or consume all of what is real. Experimental conditions are still necessary, as is an experimenter who designs a research question. Genetically modified soybeans can also become something outside of the lab that were not defined in the lab, just as viruses in the world can act in ways not predicted in the lab. The laboratory and the world are two different sites and contexts for the real. Stengerss explanation suggests that understanding is incomplete without what happens beyond the lab, just as the lab gives us one necessary insight into an ingredient of reality. Yet, no one I spoke with in my circles of politically left Covid conspiracy theorists had spent significant time conversing with natural scientists or reading their literature; they are science skeptics. I have studied (as a novice) the evolution and cladistics of influenzas and spoken with so-called gain of function researchers conducting experiments where viruses are modified to learn about molecular pathways and points of vulnerability. Politicians and conspiracy mongers can make viral experiments like the ones in Wuhan sound illicit because the public is largely unaware of their existence, of prior controversies over gain-of-function experiments that have been ongoing for over a decade, of existing collaborations between US and Chinese researchers on viral emergence, and of the normal practice of science which involves disagreements, reversals, wrong directions, missteps, and hazards.

All these things typically occur within scientific practice without there necessarily being a secret plan by any coherent group to do something unlawful or harmful. Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes, among others, have shown that there have been coherent plans to mislead through science, for example in tobacco studies sponsored by tobacco companies or in minority statements on climate change research. What is interesting about what Conway and Oreskes uncover is that these instances of corrupt science were promoted by a handful of scientists who were speaking outside of their fields, funded by the companies they were supposed to be speaking objectively about, and motivated by Cold War fears of an expansive role for government. Recent Covid-19 studies including vaccine studies and trials, on the other hand, are widely distributed across many nations and institutions with competing political interests, their funding sources are varied, and data is collected from public and private health entities governed by every country in the world, making coordinated effort among them more than unlikely. Conway and Oreskess merchants of doubt have a clear motive, yet nevertheless failed to win on the science: the scientific consensus in 99.9 percent of peer reviewed research is that climate change is human induced, and cigarette packages currently carry warning labels about carcinogens.

Not only lay observers fail to see scientists as allies when accessing the real, as I discovered when doing field research in Indonesia in the 2000s during the H5N1 influenza outbreak. At that time, the global health community believed H5N1 influenza could become the next global pandemic, and the international community intervened in Indonesia to try to suppress the emergence of a variant that could transmit between humans. Still, many Indonesians were skeptical that such a respiratory virus could emerge from their region, or that H5N1 was a threat to humans. Some Indonesians claimed that the bird flu intervention was a way for the Freemasons to infiltrate Indonesia; that H5N1 was deliberately spread by the United States to dominate the Indonesian poultry market; or that the flu was bioengineered by the West to control Indonesia. While it would be easy to believe that these conspiracies would only appeal to those outside of scientific worlds, the Indonesian minister of health, Dr. Siti Fadilah Supari, a cardiologist, suggested that the virulence of H5N1 may have been biologically engineered by the United States. Since Los Alamos National Laboratory maintains a pathogen database for influenza and was keeping Indonesian samples, she said, and since Los Alamos was the site of the Manhattan Project, Dr. Supari proposed that there must be a nefarious reason for their interest in Indonesian influenzas:

It is not impossible that there will be a group of people in the developed countries that are insane enough to reengineer the viruses to create outbreaks in the third world. Dont you realize that if you have the expertise and the sophisticated facility to develop vaccine, you also possess the genetic engineering capability to create new and more virulent viruses?

Many critical observers of Suparis claims to viral sovereignty focused on her interest in health equality. Geographer Matthew Sparke, for example, uses international criticism of Suparis reluctance to share viral samples with the global health community to illustrate inattention to global health disparities. In failing to include the virus-in-itself as part of his analysis, however, Sparke missed out on the inequalities created by a lack of attention to what the virus might be doing beyond the human gaze. While Dr. Supari failed to recognize how Indonesian H5N1 was evolving through the transnational transportation of poultry, the way international scientific networks were indispensable for representing and sensing the presence of the virus, or how epidemiological data made human-to-human transmission of the virus visible within her own country, she was also later accused of skimming funds from the Ministry of Healths H5N1 initiative. Dr. Supari presented herself as advancing Indonesian science, but she often did not seem to value microbiology or medicine as ways to make sense of the world or identify what was real. For her, the conspiracies were more valuable than the virus. As the central person responsible for the health of the Indonesian public and as the person in charge of advancing Indonesias medical research capacity, Dr. Supari was known to argue that Indonesians dont get the flu. For the Indonesian minister of health, the viral real was not what counted.

Trust and mistrust are fundamental to the experience of viral worlds and the risks they carry. Anthony Giddens explains how trust and expert systems are intertwined and understood in relation to risk: Trust may be defined as confidence in the reliability of a person or system, regarding a given set of outcomes or events, where that confidence expresses a faith in the probity or love of another, or in the correctness of abstract principles (technical knowledge). Furthermore, writes Giddens, respect for technical knowledge usually exists in conjunction with a pragmatic attitude towards abstract systems, based upon attitudes of skepticism or reserve. Unlike Molly, who believes in Covid conspiracies as an educated outsider, Dr. Suparis skepticism and reserve came from within the expert scholarly system that she was a part of. Dr. Supari would have done well to ask deeper questions about the influenza plaguing her country, questions the immateriality of her nationalism alone could never answer. As Gabriel might argue, Indonesian conspiracy theories are nonetheless also real in that they motivated action and set the stage for how Indonesia engaged with the global community during the H5N1 outbreak. Covid conspiracies are also real in the concrete effects they have on the unvaccinated or in our ability to cohere as a political community.

If conspiracies are real in Gabriels terms, they are still at odds with the reality of other domains like the virus in the body or lab, or Covid vaccines within public health. If we are to follow Gabriels idea of domains, then domains need not be logically consistent. Things can be false and still be real. Gabriels example of this is unicorns, which exist and are real in childrens books and bedrooms. I began this inquiry wondering what had happened to the sense of shared reality that I had with friends who I believe to be like myself. How had Covid intervened to bring conspiracy thinking between us? One element of the viral real involves questions of trust. With a deep distrust of technoscientific and public-health elites, Molly did not find Covid a credible threat, or find masking or vaccines credible solutions in the pandemic. With the virus always in the realm of the unseen, there is no way around engaging with technoscientific experts, however. I myself am none too credulous when it comes to elite knowledges, but I do not believe there is a them with a superhuman capacity for self-organization. From my experience studying H5N1, I recognized a pattern to the way Dr. Supari blamed the enemy at hand, the United States, for bioengineering the influenza virus at Los Alamos, and the identical way many in the United States wanted to blame China for bioengineering and releasing SARS-CoV-2. There are many ways to address the real, and science is one of them. Social constructionism brought us hope for the possibility of changing the worlds we have made. Perhaps new realisms can also bring us hope if we recognize that human ethical decision-making will always be part of the real, along with unicorns and viruses.

See the rest here:

The Viral Real - Journal #130 October 2022 - E-Flux

NEW YORK, Oct. 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Pregabalin Market by Application and Geography Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026 size is expected to grow by USD 153.03 million from 2022 to 2026, at a CAGR of 3.74%. The increasing presence of a large patient pool related to neuropathic pain, the increasing geriatric population, and the rising applications of pregabalin in various diseases are themajor factors propelling the market growth. However, the growing preference for alternatives and stringent regulatory policies may impede market growth. To get more insights on drivers and challenges Request a Sample PDF

Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Pregabalin Market 2022-2026

Key Market Dynamics:

Market Driver: The presence of a large patient pool related to neuropathic pain is one of the key drivers supporting thepregabalin market growth.Neuropathic pain is associated with various disorders such as diabetic neuropathy, chemotherapy-induced pain, shingles, and herniated disk. There have been growing cases of these disorders, especially in the geriatric population. Meanwhile, the increasing number of individuals preferring chemotherapy for cancer treatment is fueling cases of chemotherapy-induced pain. Furthermore, according to the CDC, the incidence of shingles is approximately four per 1,000 US population annually. Overall, there are an estimated one million cases of herpes zoster in the US annually. Such a scenario will lead to an increase in the adoption of pregabalin, which, in turn, will drive the growth of the market during the forecast period.

Market Challenges: Growing preference for alternatives is one of the key factors hindering thepregabalin market growth.As the current treatments are associated with many unmet needs, end-users are looking to shift to alternative therapies. For instance, diabetic neuropathic pain can be reduced by supplementing essential acids, alpha-lipoic acid, gamma-linolenic acid, and omega-3 fatty acids. Similarly, acupuncture can be an effective way to manage peripheral neuropathy. Acupuncture uses pressure points across the body to realign the body's energy.Thus, the use of these alternative therapies may hinder growth prospects in the forecast period.

To get insights about additional key drivers, trends, and challenges available with Technavio.Read our Sample Report right now!

Market Segmentation

North Americawill be the leading region with 36% of the market's growth during the forecast period. The US and Canada are the key countries for the pregabalin market inNorth America. The increase in the older population, coupled with the established adoption of LYRICA and Cymbalta in new indications and the introduction of new drugs for the treatment of neuropathic pain, will facilitate thepregabalin market growth in North America over the forecast period.

The Neuropathic pain application segment will contribute the highest market share growth during the forecast period. Neuropathic pain affects 20% to 30% of diabetic neuropathy patients. Thus, the demand for pregabalin is rising due to more occurrences of diabetic neuropathy, which is boosting the growth of the market.Pregabalin is an alternative treatment for people with neuropathic pain that has not responded to other drugs.It effectively reduces the symptoms of numerous neuropathic pain conditions and positions itself as a first-line therapy option with exceptional safety and efficacy.These factors will drive segment growth during the forecast period.

View our sample reportfor additional insights into the contribution of all the segments, and regional opportunities in the report.

Some Companies Mentioned with their Offerings

Related Reports:

Pharmaceuticals Wholesale and Distribution Market by Types of Drugs and Geography Forecast and Analysis 2021-2025

Marine Pharmaceuticals Market by Product and Geography Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026

Pregabalin Market Scope

Report Coverage

Details

Page number

120

Base year

2021

Forecast period

2022-2026

Growth momentum & CAGR

Accelerate at a CAGR of 3.74%

Market growth 2022-2026

USD 153.03 million

Market structure

Fragmented

YoY growth (%)

3.27

Regional analysis

North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of World (ROW)

Performing market contribution

North America at 36%

Key consumer countries

US, Canada, Germany, China, Japan, and Republic of Korea

Competitive landscape

Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope

Companies profiled

Biomax Biotechnics Pvt.Ltd., Camber Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cipla Ltd., Dr. Kumars Pharmaceuticals, Genesis Biotec Inc., H. L. Healthcare Pvt. Ltd., Lupin Ltd, Medley Pharmaceuticals Ltd., MK Medicine, MSN Laboratories, Neuracle Lifesciences Pvt. Ltd., Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc., Phoenix Biologicals Pvt. Ltd., Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, Swastik Life Sciences, Torrent Pharmaceuticals Ltd., and Vibcare Pharma Pvt. Ltd.

Market Dynamics

Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID-19 impact and future consumer dynamics, and market condition analysis for the forecast period.

Customization purview

If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized.

Table of Contents:

1 Executive Summary

2 Market Landscape

3 Market Sizing

4 Five Forces Analysis

5 Market Segmentation by Application

6 Customer Landscape

7 Geographic Landscape

8 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends

9 Vendor Landscape

10 Vendor Analysis

11 Appendix

About Us

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

ContactTechnavio ResearchJesse MaidaMedia & Marketing ExecutiveUS: +1 844 364 1100UK: +44 203 893 3200Email:media@technavio.comWebsite:www.technavio.com/

Global Pregabalin Market 2022-2026

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A 37-year-old died due to complications of taking too many herbal supplements, a coroner determined.

Seema Haribhai died from liver failure after taking herbal supplements to treat her arthritis, according to the coroner's report reviewed by Insider. The coroner, Mary Hassell, did not state which supplements she believed caused the liver failure.

The court heard that Haribhai, who lived in London, England, had concerns about "conventional medication" and turned to an Ayurvedic practitioner. Ayurveda is a traditional medical system practiced in South Asia for 5,000 years that touts healing through diet and lifestyle changes.

The Ayurvedic practitioner gave Haribhai an unspecified amount of supplements. Within a few weeks of ingesting the supplements, she developed liver failure.

Haribhai went back to the Ayurvedic practitioner with yellow skin, a sign of liver disease, after taking the supplements, the court heard. According to the coroner's report, the Ayurvedic practitioner neither told her to stop taking the supplements nor encouraged her to go to a hospital.

"All medicines can cause harm, even those that are herbal based," Hassell said.

Top Ayurvedic doctors from India told Insider the country's most reputable schools require eight to 10 years after high school studying the practice, plus several years of apprenticeship. Practitioners from these schools use Ayurvedic teachings to supplement modern medicine, and encourage their patients to take medicine prescribed by allopathic doctors.

There is no standardization in practice, however, which can lead to variation in schooling and treatment. The Ayurvedic doctor who treated Haribhai had a five-year degree and one year apprenticeship.

Global sales of supplements increased after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the UK, vitamin sales increased by 63% between March 2020 and 2021, according to a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Public Health.

Both the UK and US do not closely regulate alternative medicine practitioners or herbal supplement use. Doctors who have witnessed a rise in health problems from supplement use have called for greater oversight.

Hassell said she encourages the UK to better regulate Ayurvedic teachings and herbal treatments. Inaction may cause more deaths stemming, the coroner warned.

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Woman, 37, dies after herbal supplements led to liver failure: coroner - Insider

Vitiligo is a condition that causes the skin to begin to lose its pigmentationor colorfor no apparent reason, resulting in white patches that are especially noticeable in people whose skin tone is naturally dark.

If youve heard of this chronic skin condition, theres a very good chance it was in association with Michael Jackson. The King of Pop is reported to have had vitiligoand other celebrities have it as well, including model Winnie Harlow, who has had an empowering presence of showing the condition's unique beauty and style. All in all, though, its a fairly rare disorder: Approximately .5% to 2% of the worlds population has vitiligo, according to a study in Dermatology Reports.

Whats behind this uncommon disease and is there a treatment for it? Heres what the experts have to say.

What is vitiligo exactly? Vitiligo is mainly an autoimmune disease of the skin that targets pigment-producing cells called melanocytes, says Bassel H. Mahmoud, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of dermatology and member of the Vitiligo Clinic and Research Center at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester. This results in patches of depigmentation in the form of chalky white areas on the skin which can range from being very small to very large, even covering most of the skin surface.

There are two different types of vitiligo, per the National Institutes of Health. The most common is called non-segmental vitiligo. This tends to spread slowly with new patches developing off and on, says Dr. Mahmoud. Non-segmental vitiligo tends to be symmetric, meaning it appears on both sides of the body, and may stop and start throughout the persons life. It usually occurs on one or a few areas of skin, although it can sometimes occur more broadly across the body.

The other type is known as segmental vitiligo. Segmental vitiligo may spread quickly, but it tends to stabilize after six to 12 months and then stop, says Dr. Mahmoud. Once segmental vitiligo stops spreading, most people do not develop new patches later in life.

Vitiligo is an equal-opportunity skin disruptor, affecting both women and men and people of all races. You might think the disease is more common in the Black community, but thats only because it is more visible, due to their darker skin, says Nada Elbuluk, M.D., an associate professor of dermatology at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and director of the USC Skin of Color Center and Pigmentary Disorders Clinic in Los Angeles. People with whiter skin can get vitiligo as well, the appearance is just not as dramatic.

Related: 10 Rare Autoimmune Diseases That Dont Get Enough Attention

When you think of autoimmune diseases, you might picture lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. With those conditions, the bodys immune system, which normally functions as a barrier to prevent harmful bacteria, viruses and infection from infiltrating the body, turns on itself and begins attacking healthy cells in the body instead.

When the immune system begins to attack healthy tissue, it often results in inflamed joints, according to the National Institutes of Health. In cases where the immune system attacks the skin, it can lead to rashes, blisters and color change. The latter is what happens with vitiligo, an autoimmune condition where the immune systems assault on skin cells results in the loss of pigmentation.

As is the case with many autoimmune conditions, scientists still arent sure what causes only some people to develop vitiligo. But certain risk factors make it more likely that youll develop the condition than others.

For instance, having another autoimmune condition may increase your risk: In a study by researchers at NYU Langone Health in New York City, scientists found more than a two-fold higher prevalence of rheumatoid arthritis and four-fold higher prevalence of multiple sclerosis in people with vitiligo versus the general population. The condition is associated with other autoimmune diseases as well, such as diabetes mellitus, thyroid disease or alopecia areata (a type of hair loss), adds Dr. Mahmoud.

Addisons disease, pernicious anemia, psoriasis and systemic lupus are also associated with vitiligo. In one study, 15% to 25% of people with vitiligo had at least one other autoimmune condition.

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Research in the journal Dermatologic Clinics suggests there may be as many as 50 different genetic variations that contribute to people developing this disease. (It should be noted that genetic predisposition and a hereditary condition are not the same: While its true you are at higher risk for vitiligo if one of your parents has the condition, even people without a first-degree relative who has vitiligo may still develop genetic mutations for it.)

Regardless, genetic variations alone are not enough to cause the diseasethat genetically inclined individual then needs to have a trigger event, Dr. Elbuluk says. For instance, they might get a sunburn or scrape their skin or even be exposed to a lot of stress, she explains. There needs to be something that triggers the onset of vitiligo.

Yes, actually. If you have vitiligo, your hair can become white, confirms Dr. Elbuluk. The same melanocytes that give your skin its color also give your hair its color, so hair can be affected as well. Not just the hair on your head, either: We have hair all over our bodies, Dr. Elbuluk points out, and people with vitiligo may lose hair color on their arms, legs and other areas. Whats more, some people also lose color in areas such as mucous membranes, which includes the inside of the mouth, nose and the genitals, adds Dr. Mahmoud.

Mainly though, youll notice the condition due to skin color loss in major areas of the body. Vitiligo can develop anywhere on a persons skin, says Dr. Mahmoud. It usually appears first on the face, hands and feet. Over time, the spots and patches can grow, and then appears on other areas of the body as well.

Just as there is no single known cause for vitiligo, there is no known way to prevent it from developing either. We dont have a way to screen for it in utero or test to see if you might get it later in life, says Dr. Elbuluk. There is no way to prevent it if you are genetically predisposed.

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The main thing, she says, is to try and reduce exposure to the things experts know can trigger the condition. For instance, we know that stress can be a trigger event for people who are predisposed to vitiligo, she says. So as much as you can improve your emotional balance and psychological wellbeing, it may be beneficial.

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There is no cure for this skin condition, but there are effective treatments available and several promising options in the pipeline. Current treatments include:

This non-invasive approach uses narrowband UVB light to improve the color of depigmented skin. A study in JAMA Dermatology found that 74% of people with vitiligo saw at least 25% improvement in their condition after using phototherapy for six months, while 44% of people saw a 75% or greater improvement in vitiligo on their face after six months. (Notably, study participants did not see a major improvement of the condition on their hands or feet using phototherapy.)

Once considered the standard treatment approach, PUVA is used less frequently now due to newer methods that have fewer side effects. Psoralens are types of drugs, in topical or pill form, that cause the skin to darken when exposed to ultraviolet A light. This approach is not recommended for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding; it may also raise your risk for skin cancer.

Research in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology found improved skin color in 82% of vitiligo cases after three weekly laser therapy sessions, for a total of 12 treatments total.

According to a meta-analysis in the Journal of Clinical and Aesthetic Dermatology, 65% of people with vitiligo had improved pigmentation three months after daily use of a corticosteroid cream. (The American Academy of Dermatology notes that this approach may be most successful for vitiligo on the face; it is less effective on hands and feet.)

If vitiligo lesions fail to respond to the treatments above, dermatologists refer to it as recalcitrant vitiligo, says Dr. Mahmoud. The treatment resistance is usually related to a complete loss of the melanocyte reservoir in the affected area, he says. In these cases, repigmentation will not be achieved unless melanocytes are harvested from normally pigmented skin then introduced surgically into the affected white area of vitiligo.

Surgery involves either tissue or cellular transplantation procedures. Melanocyte keratinocyte transplantation procedure (MKTP) is a cellular transplantation technique that is emerging as an important solution, says Dr. Mahmoud. MKTP is a precise, fast and safe surgical technique for transplantation that enables treatment of large, depigmented lesions during a single surgical setting. A recent review in JAMA Dermatology of 8,776 patients who underwent surgery for vitiligo found that 81% of participants experience at least a 50% improvement in their skin pigmentation with surgical intervention.

A last resort option, the systematic removal of pigmentation works best for people who have already lost the majority of their skin color due to vitiligo. This approach uses a cream to remove pigment from the rest of the skina process that can take several years of daily treatments to complete.

In addition, a class of drugs called Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors have shown success in clinical trials for treating vitiligo, according to a new study, but are not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration for this condition. JAK inhibitors work by targeting and disrupting the signals from specific proteins that trigger the depigmentation process.

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Given the ongoing, disruptive nature of the disease, its natural to wonder if alternative approaches like changing your diet might help reduce the appearance of vitiligo. In a nutshell: Nope. There are no clinical trials showing direct correlations between diet, exercise and vitiligo, says Dr. Elbuluk. Still, a healthy eating plan may have benefits: There are some studies that show certain antioxidants may help stabilize vitiligo, so [a] healthy, balanced diet is goodeven if there is no hard data that eating certain foods will make a difference.

So ignore what you may have seen on the internet about vegan diets miraculously curing the condition: Science does not support it. Recent research in both the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine and Dermatologic Clinics suggests that there is not enough evidence to conclusively say any specific diet can make a major impact on this diseaseand if it does, it is in conjunction with traditional medical intervention.

Many people living with vitiligo say the stigma and misinformation spread by the general public make them feel ostracized with this disease. It is not contagious and people with vitiligo have not done anything to bring it on themselves, stresses Dr. Mahmoud. The mental health aspect of the condition is challenging, he adds: Vitiligo can have a devastating psychological effect on patients and can affect their quality of life.

A growing social movement encourages people with vitiligo to embrace their unique skin appearance, and a growing number of celebrities are opening up about life with this condition. These are some of the public figures who have been associated with vitiligo:

Bottom line? There is nothing easy about living with vitiligo, but theres no reason to feel embarrassed, either. As more and more celebrities raise their voices and celebrate their skin differences, theyre paving a path for others to do the same.

Next up: Protect your skin with the best sunscreen for every type of skin.

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What Is Vitiligo? All About This Unique Skin Condition That Impacts Skin Pigmentation, and How To Treat It - Parade Magazine