Hey it pays the bills
It’s all very well to diss the very idea of alternative medicine (alternative to what? the kind that works?) but what you don’t seem to understand is that people will spend money on it, and not in small quantities, either.
Feeling a tad listless? Perhaps your DNA is insufficiently activated. You may want to consult the healers at Oughten House Foundation, specializing in “tools and techniques for self-empowerment . . . through DNA Activations.” Oughten House recommends regular therapy as part of its DNA Activation Healing Project, at $125 per hour-long session.
$125 for…waving your hands around gently, or turning the dials on a convincing-looking Machine of some sort, or handing out a banana milkshake, and calling that ‘DNA Activation.’ Not a bad haul.
[W]hat was once a ragtag assortment of New Age nostrums has metastasized into a multibillion-dollar industry championed by dozens of lobbyists and their congressional sympathizers. Among the most popular therapies are acupuncture, at $50 to $100 per session; reflexology, which involves massaging various parts of the hands and feet, starting at $35 an hour; and aromatherapy, which relies on the supposed healing properties of about 40 “essential oils,” with treatments at $30 to $90 an hour.
Well – look, at least those people probably won’t be needing a bailout or an emergency loan or an adjusted mortgage. At least the practitioners are making a living. Maybe we should all do it, and then there’d be no more Economic Disaster.
Major hospital systems, notably Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins and New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, incorporate CAM-based programs like aromatherapy and therapeutic touch, often bracketed as “integrative medicine.”… “We’re all channeling East Indian healers along with doing gall-bladder removal,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics. Mr. Caplan harbors no illusions about what’s behind the trend: “It’s not as noble as, ‘I want to be respectful to Chinese healing arts.’ It’s more, ‘People are spending a fortune on this stuff! We could do this plus our regular stuff and bill ’em for all of it!'”
Well quite. I’m strongly tempted to hang out a shingle myself. I think I’d be really good at activating people’s DNA.
Wasnt it Groucho Marx that said never give a sucker an even break?
Gosh, I remember once getting extremely ill and come to think of it NOW, after reading excellent insightful article in Note and Comment I was, at that specific time, on a detox diet. I kept drinking the dark brown (diluted with water) liquid, hoping it would make me feel better. It never did. It never did.
Echinnacea, St John’s Wort, Evening Primrose Oil, and Cod-Liver Oil and countless other items of that ilk are just some of the products I have in the medicine cupboard. Are all of these just placebo’s?
Yes Mo. Throw them all out.
The dark brown liquid doesn’t even seem to have been much good as a placebo!
Ophelia’s right, MT. These are all just expensive herbal preparations (excluding the cod oil) with no medicinal value. They do treat a condition known as “hippies with too much money” – these and other nostrums are remarkably effective at emptying the wallets of nice but gullible people who shop at “health” food stores and who have an irrational fear of “Big Pharma.” They’re remarkably effective at enriching self-styled Natural Healers who run New Age trinket shops, too.
Don’t feel too bad about getting sucked in to the herbal medicine racket, but do feel just bad enough to turn your skepticism back on. I once tried to substitute St. John’s Wort and Valerian, respectively, for the depression and acute panic/anxiety I live with. The bottomline is that wishful thinking only convinced me of their efficacy for about two weeks, until I spiraled into a crisis that only real, pharmacologically active medicines could treat. I learned my lesson.
Quackery isn’t harmless. Belief in it can cause to leave real physical and mental maladies untreated. At best, we suffer unnecessarily and spend the same amount of money, except on snake oil. At worst, we can find ourselves in a full-scale health crisis, or dead.
I suggest reading some of the following sites:
quackwatch.org
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org
Check out any “treatments” you come across with quackwatch.org before buying them.
Just for clarification: I referred to my lifelong problems with depression and panic, but I shouldn’t leave the impression that these plague me uncontrollably. Like many other people, when I adhere to my medication regimen, I’m productive, normal (!), and generally happy (not withstanding my constitutional prickliness and cynicism). I’ve fallen off the medication wagon a few times over the past 20 years, and they’ve been real doozies.
I relate this not to be a drama queen, but to illustrate that many ailments really can be quite effectively treated with the right medicine. I hate to see people convince themselves otherwise, and suffer needlessly because of an irrational aversion to pharmaceuticals. Obviously, my experience is with psychotropic medications, but the same thing applies to purely physical ailments (yes, I’m aware of the epistemological problems there. . just don’t want to get into them).
“Wasnt it Groucho Marx that said never give a sucker an even break?”
Actually, the expression is associated with W.C.Fields.
I can recommend the book “Scams from the Great Beyond” as an excellent primer for the would be con artist.
The sub-title “How to make easy money off of ESP, Astrology, UFOs, Crop Circles, Cattle Mutilations, Alien Abductions, Atlantis, Channeling, and Other New Age Nonsense” pretty much says it all.
You mean, I was given a teaspoonful of cod liver oil every morning for nothing?! I want my taste buds back!
The treatments are not all placebo only. St John’s Wort is a genuine mild anti-depressant, I understand. My doctor suggested it, though I found it ineffective. I got a much better result from starting regular cycling to work.
It really irritates me that so many people tell of their wonder cures from quackery. An uncle can’t speak highly enough of homeopathy after his ‘cure’, and my wife (whose father is a very good doctor) is still sucked in by vitamin supplements, ‘allergists’ and the like.
I once spoke with a doctor GP who kept her prices lower than others in her practice out of a badly-defined social conscience motive – embarrassed to charge people for helping them. The lower price somehow signalled to the patients, poor though they were, that they would get better quality advice from someone else. I suggested she rack up her rates to 50% more than anyone else ESPECIALLY alternative medicine types, wear a power suit, talk in alt medicine jargon and have a lot of stainless steel and marble put in the lobby. She would immediately be perceived as a better doctor, and people would pay the rate with pleasure.
Crikey, here is another one of those “blue” stories and I really mean blue.
Paul Karason has been left looking and feeling blue after using silver extract to treat a skin condition.
news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20080641297781