Reply #8: The term "healthcare consumer" is a red herring

[Orrex]

Studies take money and people with the mindset to do them. Therefore scientific studies are done generally when required--for FDA approval of drugs, for example. People who do research generally do it because of large grants that they get through their universities. Only large drug companies who have patented medications can afford that. Studies that are done outside of that paradigm are hit and miss, and scattered, and depend on someone's great interest in the subject, and may take time and finances.

Well, that's how it goes, and it explains why pharmaceutical companies charge so much for new drugs and why they fight to protect their patents. If "alternative" "medicine," a multi-billion-dollar industry, wants to achieve credibility, it must pursue these studies in an open and intellectually honest fashion.

Instead, "alternative" practitioners prefer to maintain the "alternative" mystique, as if they're underground healers struggling to benefit humanity regardless of the agenda of Big Pharma or the evil AMA.

Additionally, one does not "consume" healthcare--a necessary and often life-altering service--the way one "consumes" a cellphone or an SUV. To refer to "healthcare consumers" is to attempt to blur the argument from what-is-actually-effective to what-can-be-most-effectively-marketed. It is a reprehensible practice whether undertaken by pharmaceutical companies or by Andrew Weil et al, and it should be abolished.

And to allow the mythical free market to work as you describe, we'd have to dergulate the pharmaceutical industry and allow them to engage in whatever marketing methods that their vast wealth permits, just as we currently allow "alternative" practitioners do now. In fact, pharmaceutical companies are currently at a disadvantage in this regard because they are regulated in a way that "alternative" pratcitioners are not.

The free market is a hopelessly poor method of improving healthcare safety and efficacy. At best, the free market can be invoked to allow the consumer a greater range of options, but that's hardly the same as improving the healthcare system itself.

Anyone who advertises a product falsely is subject to being prosecuted for fraud--there are laws in place that take care of fraud.

That's true, but it doesn't stop snakeoil peddlars like Dr. Hulda Clark and Kevin Trudeau from marketing their wares. If we are to believe that these anti-fraud laws are effective, then these charlatans must be required to pay for their crimes. Instead, Trudeau touts himself as a martyred crusader fighting to bring his miracle cures to the public despite the hegemonic FCC.

I would have more sympathy for the "alternative" "medicine" industry if it weeded out criminals like these. Apparently the free market is insufficient to this task, as well.