Big Placebo
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"[[Health freedom|But what about the customer's freedom to do what they want?]]" | "[[Health freedom|But what about the customer's freedom to do what they want?]]" | ||
| − | Nobody's saying people shouldn't be allowed to choose their own treatments. The point is not forbidding people from using their preferred treatments, but objecting to the existence of a multi-billion-dollar industry built entirely (or almost) on selling placebos. Buying placebos may not be inherently wrong, but selling them is an entirely different matter. | + | Nobody's saying people shouldn't be allowed to choose their own treatments. The point is not forbidding people from using their preferred treatments, but objecting to the existence of a multi-billion-dollar industry built entirely (or almost) on selling placebos. Buying placebos may not be inherently wrong, but selling them (read: scamming people) is an entirely different matter. |
==Footnotes== | ==Footnotes== | ||
Revision as of 05:32, 16 March 2013
| Against allopathy |
| Alternative articles |
“”We hate Big Pharma. We hate big government. We don’t trust The Man. And we shouldn’t. Our health care system sucks. It’s cruel to millions of people. It’s absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-bending to those of us who can even afford it. So we run away from it, and where do we run? We leap into the arms of Big Placebo.
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| —Michael Specter[1] |
Big Placebo is a nickname given to alternative medicine companies, coined as a counterpart to the name Big Pharma, which refers to drug companies. Both names refer to the corporations' sizes and immense amounts of wealth.
The two BPs are practically identical: They are both run by selfish, greedy business executives who will do anything to make a quick buck, even if it means endangering millions of lives.
The main difference between Big Pharma and Big Placebo is that Big Pharma is regulated, to make sure its products work and don't endanger millions of lives, while Big Placebo is free to sell whatever it wants.
Big Placebo and Big Pharma
The revenue of the alternative and traditional medicine industry worldwide is estimated to be $60 billion a year,[2] and the supplement industry was worth $20 billion in 2004 in the U.S. alone.[2] Big Pharma is worth about $300 billion a year.[3] Clearly, alternative medicine isn't quite the underdog it's usually made out to be. CAM companies could improve their image dramatically by proving that their products are effective. It would also make sure that people using CAM get treatments that are better than placebos. Big Placebo clearly has enough money to test them. But they don't test them. Why? Because it would cost money. CAM companies will never prove the efficacy of their products unless they are required to by regulation, because it would require spending money (which all corporations hate) and throwing away many profitable placebos.
The purpose of every company is to make money; everything they do is purely for that end. CAM companies are no exception. They have just as much of an incentive to make money and cut costs (by using inferior or contaminated ingredients, for instance) as Big Pharma and has no financial reason to test its products or sell effective remedies. Big Pharma, on the other hand, is forced by government regulation to show its products are effective. Yet, for some reason, CAM supporters trust Big Placebo (and every single claim they make) completely. If tobacco had been first found to be dangerous not many years ago, but in the 21st century, there would have been a pretty big movement made up of CAM users (and Big Placebo, of course) to stop tobacco regulation. After all, tobacco's natural and has a long history of use in traditional medicine, so it must be good. Right?
Big Placebo isn't a monolith. Two subsections of BP that come to mind are Big Supplement/Herb/Vitamin and Big Homeo. While much, if not most, of the products that Big Placebo sells (such as homeopathic remedies) are, in fact, placebos, some products (such as herbs) can actually have some useful medicinal effect.
It's perhaps relevant to note that herbs are drugs. Not only that, but herbs are (as one site astutely remarks): "an unknown dose of an ill-defined drug, of unknown effectiveness and unknown safety".[4] Since supplements contain actual active ingredients, supplement companies are just unregulated drug companies selling untested drugs. There is no reason why they sould not be subject to the same regulation as pharmaceutical companies, given that they both deal in medicinal active susbstances.
Supplements sold in the U.S. have been known to contain dangerous levels of substances such as lead, mercury and arsenic.[5][6] If some food product were found to be unsafe, adulterated, or contaminated, there would be a tremendous scandal. But if a supplement or homeopathic product (yes, homeopathic)[7][8] is found to be dangerous (or even lethal), then the product's totally OK, and just the victim of a massive conspiracy to hide cures. (Even though the government would obviously prefer to spend less on healthcare.)
"But what about the customer's freedom to do what they want?"
Nobody's saying people shouldn't be allowed to choose their own treatments. The point is not forbidding people from using their preferred treatments, but objecting to the existence of a multi-billion-dollar industry built entirely (or almost) on selling placebos. Buying placebos may not be inherently wrong, but selling them (read: scamming people) is an entirely different matter.
Footnotes
- ↑ Michael Specter, The danger of science denial, TED Talks.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Medical Industry Overview.
- ↑ Pharmaceutical Industry, WHO.
- ↑ Patients’ guide to Magic medicine, DC's Improbable Science.
- ↑ Contaminated Herbal Medicine Products, Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
- ↑ Folk Medicine, Sources of Lead, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- ↑ Hyland’s Teething Tablets may pose a risk to children, FDA.
- ↑ Recall of Hyland's Teething Tablets, Harpocrates Speaks.