Talk:Naftalan oil

Everything on this article is wrong. Crude oil doesn't cure anything.

Like this whole article is wrong.

It just needs to be deleted.

Evieliam (talk) 15:45, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Apparently the article was exploded into a litany of extraordinary claims in 2018, and then deleted as a hoax. However, there can be encyclopedic value in describing that there is something out there, even if there's unencyclopedic weirdness associated with it. @Evieliam:, @RHaworth: please review the earlier version that I just restored from history. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 20:17, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

It is definitely based upon a fringe theory (see Naphthalene#Health effects), but we have plenty of articles on fringe theories. The question is whether it is a notable fringe theory. I think not, and have nominated it for deletion. If it survives deletion, I plan on expanding this article so that the article reflects the fact that doing this can destroy red blood cells, cause confusion, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, blood in the urine, dysfunction of the liver, cataracts, and possibly cancer. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:09, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

In case this is kept, it's a bit tricky: sources like https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/naftalan-oil-resort-azerbaijan/index.html are obviously tourism ads. They are also not WP:MEDRS compliant meaning that wellness claims cannot be made using them. Moreover, Naphthalene exposure is linked with Hemolytic anemia in the actual medical literature, so we should expect some sources to discuss this more critically than tourism-related ads. It may still be notable tourist resorts, but we can't document medical effects or claims without taking this in consideration... —PaleoNeonate – 05:28, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

I summarized some of the key historical points from a Croatian scientific journal article found earlier by Silver seren in the AfD. I think the fringe tag is not really warranted, but the previously-existing expert attention tag is, because we need someone who can assess the therapeutic effects claims in sources and summarize those appropriately. And obviously what is the distinction between the effects of the application of the oil as found in the facilities by the Croatian hospital, the Azerbaijani university hospital, and whatever random tourist-focused facilities related to the oil that there may exist in Azerbaijan? It seems quite likely that there will be at least some difference. Guy Macon, you said previously you'd help; please do. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 10:25, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

OK so randomly removing arbitrary parts of the content was not my idea of help :D but sure. I see that a lot of this revolves around the base naphthalene substance being harmful. Do we have any information about the base definition of this oil, and how much of what is in it, in which location? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 15:29, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

What do you mean "arbitrary"? in Europe the results from the Naphthalan Health Resort in Azerbaijan were largely unusable because the application of native oil was not considered acceptable What sort of crappy reasoning is that? It basically says "it was not accepted because it was not accepted". Deleting such bollocks did not "make the article objectively worse", as you claim. --Hob Gadling (talk) 11:14, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

In the meantime, Guy Macon actually started Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Croatian_source_for_for_claims_about_the_medical_effects_of_bathing_in_high-naphthalene-content_crude_oil, so it's sort of explained, it's not entirely arbitrary, it's based on the claim that the general properties of naphthalene preclude any and all discussion of health benefits. This may or may not be true, however - I expect there to exist sources out there that would avoid forcing our readers to have to have an understanding of chemistry and medicine way beyond the general encyclopedic level in order to infer this.

Hob Gadling it's amusing that you complain about that sentence, because that is actually arguably one of the most topical and uncontroversial things in that source - they explicitly acknowledge that, despite the fact thousands of papers were published in the Soviet Union about the topic, they were based on human experimentation, and unacceptable. This is probably useful for readers to properly frame the historical discussion, as based on happy-go-lucky human testing instead of more appropriate and safe methods?

On a more general note, I'm not sure the way Guy Macon and now Roxy the dog have approached editing here is helpful - removing the Acta article altogether, while keeping some of its claims. We're acting as if there's just no doubt about anything that comes out of Azerbaijani and Croatian facilities that engage with this oil is unacceptable to mention, but there's no apparent proof of that. Certainly one can state that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and probably also at least some of the governments of Azerbaijan and Croatia, would have a vested interest to promote weirdness that makes them look good because they were authoritarian or something, but this does not mean that it's inherently impossible to find sources about this that would actually state so.

Removing everything altogether, despite the fact it was published in a country with free press in 2003, seems extremely short-sighted. I understand we don't want the general encyclopedia to promote some sort of a minority view per WP:UNDUE, but first let's actually define what the purported minority view actually is.

In the case of the Croatian hospital, whatever happens to be done by medical doctors on a reasonably large scale would probably have caused a scandal already if it was entirely bonkers. I tried searching for it, using e.g. https://www.google.hr/search?q=site:hr%20naftalan%20rak - Googling Croatian websites for the words 'naftalan' and 'cancer' - but I found absolutely nothing negative in the first couple of pages, rather, I got mainstream news outlet coverage that is by and large obviously positive. Obviously this doesn't mean that there's zero chance they're giving people cancer there, but surely *someone* *somewhere* would have noticed something by now, given that it's been going on since 32 years ago. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 12:41, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Newspaper stories are generally not good sources for medical content (although a good place to look for positive articles about “alternative” treatments). As for nothing being noticed in 32 years, check out Balkan endemic nephropathy, which was first described in the 1950s but the cause not pinned down until the early years of this century. Or even look at the amount of time it took to establish the link between tobacco and cancer. Brunton (talk) 13:36, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Sure, that's certainly a possibility, but I'm not sure quite what your point is here as the article Balkan endemic nephropathy explicitly refers to a 1956 journal article published in Bulgaria, which was just as much of a communist one-party state as Azerbaijan at the time. How does the existence of apparently good science in these kinds of circumstances lead to the thinking that there's no way that there's any good science in the 1970s in Yugoslavia (that they would absolutely have to have faked their findings about the lack of carcinogenicity of the oil they extracted at Križ)? Or at any point after 1989, after that hospital was founded? Surely there's supposed to be at least a better chance today that there's someone like doctor Tanchev on this topic, someone to write anything about something going wrong with these tens of thousands of people that come in contact with this oil? Does someone have access to databases of medical journals to look something like this up? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:50, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

No amount of politics (or handwaving) changes the fact that bathing in crude oil for its medical properties is a load of old Tosh, and we should directly label it as such, which we now do. -Roxy . wooF 14:08, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

No, we're actually not, because we're spending a lot of time in the article talking about the underlying chemical substance, instead of addressing the idea that it has positive medical effects. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 15:21, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

My point was that it took about half a century after that 1956 paper described the condition to link the condition to its cause (something the BEN article doesn’t make clear). Note the dates of the references about aristolochic acid. There’s a good account of the story in Geoffrey C. Kabat (2017). Getting Risk Right: Understanding the science of elusive health risks. New York: Columbia University Press, pp 116-143. Brunton (talk) 15:03, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Right. But surely these days we have more advanced methods at our disposal, like some sort of statistical analysis of a higher incidence of cancer with populations that visited these two sets of places and exposing themselves to this oil, something that could at least inform the readers to take the carcinogenicity possibility seriously? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 15:21, 21 June 2021 (UTC)