Hey mooseman when you said “Go to SNOPES.COM….they pretty much scientifically debunked 90% of these “remedies”..” you are wrong. Why? Because I was on that site. Their so called “sources” are not scientific journals. They are just newspaper articles. I have actually found a couple SCIENTIFIC peer reviewed journal articles that say some of these non-deet things ARE effective. But I guess Snopes can’t afford a subscription to proper scientific journals even though they have millions of devotes the world wide and go on and on about their supposed intellectual superiority. Snopes is the stupidest site I have every been on. Just defenders of the status quo. But what’s worse is that they are trying to pass it off as “Scientific”. Science is not that difficult. It involves the Scientific Method. A controlled experiment with only one variable is the main idea here. So when I try citronella oil on one arm and nothing on the other – and the arm not in citronella comes back bitten and the one in citronella comes back not as bitten – that is a pretty good start. If I did it a hundred or a thousand more times it would be more reliable yes – but probably tell me the exact same thing as I already suspected after the first couple times I did the experiment. In fact Science is not that difficult. Although the big chemical companies and pharmaceutical companies would like you to believe that billion dollar double blind placebo tests are required for all proper science. Actually they are not. Those types of extensive tests are required for government regulations of “health and safety” and are actually lobbied for BY the pharmaceutical companies so that small companies can not afford to compete with them (because they can’t afford the excessive scale double-blind tests) . But ANY and I mean ANY test that uses proper scientific method IS a scientific test. There are no “proofs” in science. Proof is a logic and math term. In Science there are hypothesis – scientific methods and then theories. Theory is a loose term that is gained mostly by popular opinion of scientists of the day. A theory is NOT proof – it’s a loose consensus that is supposed to be gained by careful observation of ALL variables and results of properly conducted experiments. Doing the experiment a million times produces more reliable results of course, but anyone on a small scale can carry out a proper SCIENTIFIC experiment simply by following scientific method. That’s science – the scientific method. I don’t need a billion people double blind placebo test to prove that when I* wear citronella I* get bit significantly less than when I* don’t. Knowing from experience and empirical evidence IS indeed Science. Science IS observation of empirical evidence. Scientific method is the narrowing down of variables to one so that direct cause can be more accurately (but not always) predicted. Of course the human MAY be a variable in itself, so when safety is concerned – new drugs have to be tested on thousands of people (as each person is him/herself a variable) (unless it’s a flu vaccine then apparently it does not have to go through this process for safety). But when matters of my OWN PERSONAL bug deterrence is the question, my OWN scientific experiment is quite good enough. You can do your own if you aren’t too cheap to buy some harmless herbs and essential oils to give it a try. NO people like you need “hard” scientific evidence (even though you and snopes apparently don’t have a clue about what even constitutes “hard” scientific evidence (i.e. not newsstand articles)) I guess that makes you better and smarter than those of us who do our own scientific experiments following proper scientific method to see for ourselves. By the way: Science was never meant to be dogma. So only relying on “hard” scientific data and literature is not really in the TRUE spirit of science at all anyway. Scientific literature is the taken as the dogma for science – but it shouldn’t be – because science has no dogma. To PRACTICE science, to be A scientist – one must be a PRACTITIONER of the scientific method itself. Not just read and believe the scientific literature of what other scientists found out when they practiced science. Since each person is a variable – then no scientific test done on people can really have ONLY one variable. There will always be two variables. Therefore the scientific method the big drug companies do is done on thousands of people so that statistics can be done to show what ‘most’ people have happen to them. Still it really means sweet nothing if it doesn’t work that way on you. The only way to know if something works for you in a scientific way – is to conduct the test on yourself. So go buy some harmless cheap citronella oil, test it in a scientific experiment and stop being a holier than thou (CHEAP) Snopes thumper.
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