Monday, March 10, 2014

Oil Pulling Benefits: Myth or Cure All?



So, there's this whole thing about swishing oil around in your mouth for 20 minutes and the myriad of purported health befits. Or whatever. It's actually been around forever, literally, like ancient times.

The thing about stuff like this is, people are going to choose what they want to believe based on the ideas they already subscribe to.

 For skeptics, disregarding something is easy -- believing is hard. I count myself as more of a skeptic. Prove it to me. I'm not objective, anything I come across is already at a disadvantage in that I don't believe it to begin with. Maybe that's pessimism.

Oil pulling and other cure-alls rely heavily on anecdotal evidence ("It worked for me") and while sprinkled with elements of science and ancient mystic wisdom, those sprinklings usually amount to pseudo-scientific statements that don't adhere to any real measured, calculable, or repetitive results.

Therefore, I can't believe it.

There are a number of detox methods that have been debunked, as Snopes so eloquently puts it:

"...the endless stream of products and therapies touting detoxification benefits have been the bane of real medical science for many years. In any reasonably healthy person, the liver and kidneys already perform an efficient job of filtering out and excreting wastes and other substances potentially harmful to the body — herbal colon cleanses, foot pads, cupping therapy and the like don't improve on that or serve any function other than parting the gullible from their money..."

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