Opinion: Alternative healing or quackery?
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/18/health/alternative-medicine-offit/index.html?hpt=hp_bn13
I particularly like this introduction…
It used to be called “fringe” or “unconventional” medicine — or simply quackery. Today, it’s called “alternative,” “complementary,” “holistic” or “integrative.”
And it has moved into the mainstream. Hospitals now have dietary supplements on their formularies (list of stocked medications); offer reiki masters to cancer patients; or teach medical students how to manipulate healing energies.
Forty-two percent of hospitals offered some form of alternative therapies to their patients, according to a 2010 survey of 5,800 facilities. When asked why, almost all responded “patient demand.”
Here in the good old USofA, “patient demand” is the driving force in medicine, not science. Pharmaceutical companies market directly to our credulous population with commercials and ads in ‘respectable’ (or not) magazines and make billions irrespective of any efficacy. Our FDA approves products based on a highest bidder mentality where no proof of actual benefit is required, only that a new drug doesn’t kill too many people. Aspirin would never become a viable drug today, it is unpatentable and thus would never make it past the safety trials (if it were patentable, I am sure it would make it past the safety trials; run trials long enough and you will eventually get the results you desire). Voodoo is the way mainstream medicine is done here in our Great Country and the more expensive the treatment the better, no matter that you can get a better health outcome for a tiny fraction of the cost.
On a side, but related, note, did you hear that now obesity is now a disease? Ostensibly that is to force insurance companies to cover treatments, counseling, etc. but I see it as yet another step down the witch doctory approach to medicine here.
It is hard to believe that this country put a man on the moon just a few decades ago and has sponsored so much of the cutting edge scientific discoveries in the last half dozen decades. Of course, Germany used to be the pinnacle of science until Hitler got in charge and things changed almost over night; I wonder where the next new scientific leading country will be? Will I have to learn a new language or can I stick with English (despite all its obvious faults)?
