…what does this say about the average American’s intelligence? Was P.T. Barnum right? I was wondering…since people blow all of this money on homeopathic “medicines”, herbal remedies, and eveb more bizarre therapies (like coffee enemas for cancer), and each of these quack cures carries a disclaimer “not intended to diagnose or treat any disease”, why do people accept these totally unproven remedies?
Is it because most people didn’t take HS science?
What is going on here?:smack:
Hope springs eternal.
It bespeaks the unaffordability of modern medicine in America.
And, of course, their suffering & desperation.
Next question.
I wonder how much it was before the industry got Orrin Hatch in their pocket.
It’s just as bad in Eurpope and Asia, probably worse. The drugstores in Europe are full of homeopathic remedies. In Asia there are all sorts of traditional cures. Some of them probably work, but many are not only nonsense but lead to the slaughter of bears, tigers, and rhinos for their body parts.
This embrace of “alternative medicine” is due to a lot of things.
One is magical thinking, of the kind that wants to embrace a single fundamental cause of all illness (the one(s) that THEY don’t want you to know) and leads to the belief that eliminating “toxins” or taking glyconutrients or eliminating parasites will make them well and happy.
Many suffer from chronic conditions that mainstream medicine can alleviate, but not yet prevent or cure. Alt med promises cures.
Some people have had bad experiences with the health care system, see alt med as a cheaper way to treat themselves, want to “take control”, or have bought into philosophies and religions that are at odds with mainstream medicine.
And yes, many people are unaware of or wilfully disbelieve in the scientific method and lack critical thinking skills, thus are easy prey for quacks and scam artists.
Most of that $34 billion spent on alternative remedies is straight down the rathole of wasted time and money. The dream of the practitioners and many patients is for all those billions to come out of the pockets of all Americans through universal health care.
If the supplement industry and practitioner lobbyists together with facilitators like Senators Orrin Hatch and Tom Harkin have their way, that’s what will happen.
Yeah, last year when copper prices were so high a lot of people started wiring up their houses with kudzu and snakeskin. Price is certainly a factor, but people wouldn’t be buying this crap if they knew it didn’t work. Doctors and the medical community, like most experts, aren’t really effective at convincing the general public that their expertise is better than folk wisdom and gut feelings. Plus it’s natural to shoot coffee up your ass.
Consider the market for bottled water over ordinary potable water…we are curious beings when it comes to deciding what is good for our health.
We not only grasp at alternative straws; in the case of bottled water we pay for straws which are probably harmful for us and definitely harmful for the earth.
The alternative medicine market will only grow, driven in part by the fact that mainline medicine–while increasingly effective–is also increasingly dangerous. And I have long since given up on addressing public gullibility.
They are especially attractive if you don’t have health insurance. For instance, I used to take albuterol for my asthma, not much one inhaler lasted me a year over even more. But then the US banned CFC and now there is no more generic albuterol. So instead of paying $9.00 for an inahler I would have to pay $54.00 because the new inhalers don’t use CFC and are patented.
Now there are a lot of ways of getting around this but if you’re not savvy you might turn to natural meds.
Besides other reasons, I think it’s because the government refuses to crack down on it. Since the FDA isn’t squashing these people, I think that a lot of people assume that “alternative medicine” must be more than the fraud that it is.
Fold into the mix Big Pharmaceutical and its total lack of good PR, the alarmist news media, and the odd “miracle” and people will try something other than what the Government wants.
A society that loses its original religion will try to fill the gap with a faith in something else.
One of the problems with cracking down on alternative medicine is it feeds into the part of the fantasy that “they” don’t want you to know about A.M.
What would help if more people learned to think critically and see through the BS.
Except that America hasn’t lost it’s “original religion”, unfortunately.
True. But at least it would warn off the people who don’t buy that theory. Or even if it’s considered unwise/illegal to actually forbid it, a media campaign could help. It’s helped cut back on smoking, after all.
The media is just too stupid. They believe this kind of crap themselves. Not only that, but they always want to give “both sides”.
Um…you guys do know that there’s a capsule that can make a man larger, don’t you?
Another factor in the alt med circus is a general rejection of “experts” in favor of the salt-of-the-earth man/woman of the people who knows more than all those fancy-pants snooty types with education and degrees and such.
Who needs a dentist to help make your teeth whiter? Just follow the banner ad link and learn how a “mom” discovered the white teeth secret. Immunologists and pediatric infectious disease specialists, bah. Jenny McCarthy puts them in their place. And we don’t need no steenkin’ foreign policy experts to deal with other nations. Sarah Palin can see Russia from her back door.
When it comes to medicine, the Internet has made it easier to pick up lots of information. The problem is discriminating between reliable sources and those that are invalid/flaky/malicious. The educational system doesn’t prepare us to know the difference, and too many will happily settle for whoever shouts the loudest or is slickest at confirming our prejudices.
If you check the fine print, the part that gets bigger is your butt.
Here’s another question. Why do people assume that drugs which are approved by the FDA somehow are backed by legitimate science? Or put another way, how much do you actually know about the process by which the FDA studies drugs? Do you know that the actual clinical trials are conducted not by the FDA, but rather by doctors who often have a financial interest in the outcome? Do you know that companies can do multiple trials on a drug and report only the positive outcomes while ignoring the negative outcomes, even if most of the trials have negative outcomes?
Great point, ITR.
Also, how are we defining “alternative medicine”? If you’re talking about stuff like homeopathy, I’m with you. But there are also many substances that are not part of the formulary of any health insurance plan, yet have been found to be effective in clinical trials. And, drugs that are not being promoted by Big Pharma are less likely to undergo clinical testing, and therefore less likely to have such certificates of legitimacy.
But medicines pushed by big Phrauda are what is costing Americans $34B a year, not someone using cinnamon to control blood sugar. (Which, BTW, is dangerous if you use cassia cinammon because it contains the natural blood thninner coumarin.)