“The simple names favored by the alternative medicine community provide an illusion of safety and comprehensibility that the chemical names can’t match. Another common chemical name for methotrexate is amethopterin, which comes from the roots meth, Greek for wine, which I might stretch to spirits, and pterin, Greek for feathers. And naproxen is a chemical analog of salicylic acid, which can be extracted from willow bark. I strongly suspect that if Shepherd’s rheumatologist had called what he prescribed spirits of feathers and an extract of willow, rather than methotrexate and naproxen, Meadows would have been happier.”
-- From “Don’t Take Medical Advice from the New York Times Magazine,” by Michelle M. Francl, a chemistry professor at Bryn Mawr University. Francl is responding to an article in the Times by Susannah Meadows about Meadows’s son, Shepherd, who had juvenile idiopathic arthritis; Francl calls Meadows’s preference for “alternative” medicines “molecular paranoia” and “chemophobia.”
"Methotrexate" has always seemed like the harshest generic name around - its phonetics scream a scorched-earth policy to me that "amethopterin" doesn't.
Posted by: Jessica | February 08, 2013 at 05:38 AM