Poinsettias are non-toxic, despite the persistent myth!

[bamboo]

What a bunch of bullshit all the way around The dosage makes the poison- Paracelsus ( The father of toxicology)

[Christopher Green]

With all due respect to Paracelsus, this is an oversimplification and irrelevant here.

Poinsettia is a member of the Euphorbiaceae, most of which are dangerously toxic; thus it is supposed among some that Poinsettia is also toxic. But the toxic principles found in other Euphorbias are distinctly absent from Poinsettia, and there is no evidence that Poinsettia sap is anything worse than a mild, if annoying, irritant at any exposure. There is only one published case of death attributed to Poinsettia poisoning, and it is unsubstantiated.

[Bill Oliver]

True and irrelevant. Noting the diffrence between ricin and water is a useful task, even though both are toxic -- at different doses.

billo

[paghat]

There is no such thing as a toxic "dose" of poinsettia latex, & that's the scientific fact. So your silly-ass & archly-cliche quote applies to poinsettias only if it applies to water & Taco Time burritos. If "poisonous" is defined so broadly as to include drowning because the dose of water was an ocean, or eating so many spicy burritos that one's stomach bursts & your sphincter turns inside out. Thus too large a dose of exercise is poisonous. Too large a dose of standing up is poisonous. Too large a dose of wakefulness is poisonous. Only if "poisonous" & "dose" are catch-all joke-words is any of this rational, & the fact remains that it is physically impossible to injest enough poinsettia for it to magically become what it is not, toxic.

A hunk of granite is not poisonous & having one's head bashed in with a large rock does not cause death because of the rock's high-dose toxicity.

The quotation is of course a poor translation AND out context at that. A truer-to-the-original version would be "All things are poison & nothing is without poison. The right dose distinguishes a poison from a cure," as Paraclesus was much more an alchemist than a physician in the modern sense, I believed in alchimical magic. What he taught itself turns out to have minimal application to science, but in the popular mistranslation Paracelsus is caused to imply something other than he actuall said. The idea that "NOTHING is inherently toxic but EVERYTHING can be toxic in excess" is now well known to be profoundly false, & even Paracelsus knew that a study of toxins was NOT a study of all things in excess, since his real meaning was standard among alchemists & still promulgated by homeopaths who believe infinitely small amounts of poisons have effects on the body the exact opposite of their influence at large doses. This is magical thinking, not physics, certainly not toxicology.

Unfortunatley the partially misunderstood & entirely outmoded theory IS still used to justify dumping millions of small doses of massively toxic substances into the environment every day, under the premise that low doses of even the world's worst toxins are harmless in concentrated soups, no matter how large the total amount, so long as no single toxin would be harmful at the low dose that is permitted for each individual component of the multitudes of toxins dumped.

-paghat the ratgirl

[bamboo]

Oh shit now they are dumping poinsettias into the enviornemt,

Christmas is allready weird enough everyboddy sitting around looking at a dead tree eathing candy out of their socks.