Snake Oil: Cheaper than Kaiser
A friend of mine recently came down with a hideous, unexplained rash on his arm. It kept him awake at night, itching and burning. I met him in the local health food store, lurking like a leper by the peaches, with big bags under his eyes.
Our local health food store is also the local community hang out. It sells organic produce, herbal tinctures, Dr Bronners and raw food snacks. If you spend long enough there, you’ll run into two or three people you know.So while we stood there, gazing in horror at his medieval-looking arm, a few other friends gathered around.
“What am I going to do?” Asked my friend. “Does anyone know a good doctor I could call?”
“You should get some calendula and make an infusion,” suggested somebody, in a helpful tone.
“You need to bath it in your own urine,” advised someone else. “Everything your body needs is in your urine.”
“You need to do a liver cleanse,” said a third. “Skin problems always come from liver.”
My friend, as it happens, is a European. He grew up with socialised medecine. The executive summary on socialised medecine is this: IF YOU ARE SICK, YOU GO TO THE DOCTOR. You do not worry about whether you can afford it, you just go. You go because it’s obvious: if you are sick, you need to get treated. Cost is not a question.
I also grew up with socialised medecine. I looked at his arm and I said, “If I had a rash like that, I wouldn’t mess around with infusions and urine. I’d go and see a real doctor.” He nodded.
Everyone else looked horrified, and so I did a spot poll. Not a single one of them had health insurance. Hence their reliance on folk remedies of dubious worth. Snake oil is cheaper by far than a co-payment, and even cheaper than paying for yourself to see a doctor if you aren’t insured at all.
And even if you are insured, chances are you won’t go unless you’re at death’s door. Another friend recently staggered about for a week with a belly ache that rendered her pale, and when I suggested she call her doctor, gasped, “I can’t. I don’t want this on my record. It’ll make my payments go up.”
Oy weh. I used to be involved with raising money for a free medical clinic in Burundi, the world’s poorest nation. The clinic was revolutionary, providing health care for the poor of the region. They only had to pay what they could afford, and in return, they got care. It freed the people from reliance on flaky witch doctors selling bogus treatments.
Can we apply the same revolutionary concept here? America is full of snake oil peddlers flogging fake remedies for everything from migraines to erectile dysfunction. Dubious super-nutritional supplements will save you from the natural process of aging. Laser treatments will detox you. Crystals will purify your aura. Herbal remedies and homeopathic pills (often based on the primitive medieval ‘doctrine of signatures’) will achieve curative marvels. Colonics will rejuvenate you and cure you of cancer. Some of these things work, but most are placebos at best.
Have you noticed how there’s always a new quack practitioner in the lime-light? Until they’re debunked, and their patients move on to the next miracle healer.
When will we free America from dark age superstition and allow people affordable, straight-forward access to modern medecine?
Tags: alternative-medicine, drugs, health, herbs, homeopathy, insurance, medicine
Jul 06, 2009
Are you kidding? Do you know how many people docs, hospitals and pharmaceuticals kill a year? I’ll take the “placebos.”
Jul 06, 2009
I so agree that the US needs a public health care system, socialized medicine, what ever name you want to give it; a system that puts people’s health first and without “additional” cost to the consumer. It is the right thing to do. Indeed, the for-profit system creates all kinds of problems….but least of which are the “quack-practitioners” you mention. You will have “real doctors” making mistakes, or giving you too many tests, too little tests, not the right attention b/c they are beholding to the insurance companies, the profect or/ and the fear of a law suit. And we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Some Eastern medicine is very legit and useful….even if it is in some cases the placebo affect. A mix is required. Listening to and doing what is best for the patient is what is required what ever philiosophy /background that comes …for no extra cost.. no more than what they already put in with their taxes or what they can afford. And that is the point.
Jul 06, 2009
R Smith, are YOU kidding? Do you know how many people snake oil remedies kill a year?
http://whatstheharm.net/
That site has real numbers of deaths, injuries, and monetary loss for alternative medicines and many other snake oil ideas. Modern medicine has saved countless lives over the years.
The ONLY reason we all have a growing average life span in the 70 year range is because of evidence-based science and modern medicine, and not infusions and urine baths. I’ll tell you one thing – I will always go to my doctor, with modern medicine, real evidence, and the technology of today’s world before I go to someone using outmoded 2000 (or more) year old medical methods long proven ineffective.
If the computer and technology industries were using 2000 year old ideas, we wouldn’t be typing these messages into a website – we’d still be writing on papyrus scrolls.
Jul 06, 2009
“If the computer and technology industries were using 2000 year old ideas, we wouldn’t be typing these messages into a website – we’d still be writing on papyrus scrolls.”
Not a great analogy that m8!
Jul 06, 2009
yeah, I thought of that after I posted it. Oh well. How about:
If everyone used 2000 year old medicinal methods today, half of us would be dead because our average life span would still be 35 years!
Still not great, but hopefully it gets the point across…
Jul 06, 2009
One thing I agree with (subtext) … those who are under-educated in the ways of alternative medicine should seek out those who have sought and gained credentials in those fields. Acupuncture and Chinese medicine require high degrees of training. Naturopathic doctors go through an additional 4 years of college education in their specialized field. IF you are going to try “snake oil” as you call it, do it with someone who knows what they are doing.
As our culture “splits” along the lines of conservative vs. chaos-liberal “sides” we end up with articles like the one above. Everyone taking a side and sounding very uneducated. Alternative medicine is practiced and taught at the college level in European countries. America is extremely backward in it’s ideas and concepts regarding health restoring modalities like “homeopathy”. Personally I have treated and maintained my families health this way for over 21 years. AND I have frequently sought out the advice and wisdom of those who were trained/educated beyond my level of knowledge.
Oh, and I have insurance. I didn’t have it when the children were small which is what led to my studies. But even though we have it now, we only use it when our own understanding and knowledge has reached it’s limits. I don’t risk my families life, I just go carefully into the field of Allopathic Medicine where chop it off talk about the outcome later is the general rule. Has anyone ever watched the show “HOUSE?” Do those people in that imaginary world ever really recover from his “tests” and “treatments” ???
I wish you all the best in finding your own personal “center.”
Jul 06, 2009
this supposed ‘fact’ that modernity has extended the average life span is another part of the western myth that europeans became enlightened due to some punctuated evolutionary process and took the world into progress.
the low life span was in europe and not the rest of the world. while europe was in the ‘dark’ the muslim global civilization was an enigma in history that is still unprecedented in some of its achievements. furthermore europe acquired its ‘enlightenment’ at muslim universities and from muslim civilization.
back to the point though is that there are still people today living a non-western lifestyle that far outlive us in the western lifestyle. peoples of the east and africa commonly lived into their hundreds without losing hair and teeth and bone structure. there is an abundance of evidence showing this – when are people doing to drop this myth that we outlive and outsmart everyone in all of history. europe is not the world, even though we do call any war over there a ‘world war’!
plus, alot of the credit for longer life spans goes to hygiene and nutrition, and not medicine. in fact, western medicine is quite primitive compared to the ancient (and a lot of it is lost) knowledge of other cultures. it was only 50 years ago that western doctors were saying that stress and diet have NO effect on health. give me a break!
Jul 07, 2009
Let me pose this question…Why can’t or haven’t we done the research to “officially” prove or disprove natural remedies? Some will be proven right and some will be proven wrong but I don’t understand why there has not been any research into trying to prove this to make some them officially approved and thus prescribable? I think if people new the natural remedies worked, they would prefer a natural medicine or remedy over the manufactured ones.
Jul 07, 2009
So true, cost is a big reason people are scared to get help from doctors. Though it def. gave health food stores or alternative care a bad rap, to say nothing about the doctors getting on board to offer cheaper alternative healing options or the pharmaceutical influence that works to keep us ignorant of natural and cheaper alternatives. I’d like to see people start talking about how we spend more per capita on health care and only score 36 or 37 on the list of other countries in terms of performance.
Jul 07, 2009
Sigh… I would love to have health insurance especially if it helped cover the cost of my tending to costly insidious “pre-existing conditions” that prevent me from even getting accepted… on a plan muchless having it be affordable.
I chose the alternative route because it helped every single time when standard western medical doctors threw up their arms in defeat, unable to connect the dots of the symptoms with anything they had ever learned… in order to offer any guidance, suggestions or treatments.
Kaiser docs casted my dislocated knee, well it was a cast handyman with no guidance; he built a cast around a crooked leg. Not good. I was too young to insist on better care, I trusted they knew best. My leg is still crooked.
I gave up when I had heart problems diagnosed by Kaiser Doctors at Santa Teresa Kaiser in 1980 as a “bacterial infection in my heart” (isn’t that called “Endocarditis”? Too big of a word or concept for the docs?) That infection was creating all sorts of whacky rhythms and seeming near death experiences nightly. It was a bacterial infection they “could not treat with antibiotics”, because they did not know what to kill it with because they “did not know what bacteria it was.”
What? Would you tolerate that? I was too young and too scared to know any better.
Fast forward… to 25 years later… Lyme Disease seems to be the cause of all those symptoms and ailments. So, being that I have already lived with many many years of on going undiagnosed illness, you would think they might want to make it up to me by finally being willing to treat it appropriately.
Instead it is a disease many western docs in Western United States still believes simply does not exist in California. (Those ticks remain in Lyme Connecticut).
Snake oil might seem creepy to many… as well as Castor Oil and many other traditional remedies that help a lot of symptoms… and cost about as much as a smoothie or a fashionable cup of coffee. Western Docs want us to think all alternative treatments come from Quacks. Yet what are they for not being able to diagnose and treat appropriately?
OK Western Medicine, I been seriously disillusioned. I will use my best senses to treat all I can with what works, on my own, or through the help of those willing to be with those in need of healing long enough to figure out what may help.
And I will leave broke bones, and the proof of their healing, and surgery for those doctors with tools and I will hope they remember how to treat me so I can heal. And when they give me one of those lost looks, those blank stares… I will head to the healers I know with incredible track records for healing spirits and bodies and minds… and I will listen intently to what they have discovered over time that seems to make a difference.
We all will live better for seeking help that actually works and stop depending on a field of medicine that leaves too many in need.
Yikes.
I look forward to a much better Medical Insurance plan that includes all of us in need of healing, not just the easy ones who rarely get sick. And with in that I hope there begins a way to seed out the doctors who do not have good judgement or practices instead of them getting hired at big HMOs which often deprive those in great need of proper care.
Jul 14, 2009
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Aug 13, 2009
Hey, I live in Canada and have “socialized” medicine. We don’t really call it that, we just know that if there is a problem, we can go to a doctor or a hospital without any concerns about cost. The system is not perfect, but it works relatively well.
Our taxes are higher than in USA, most of the ‘extra’ tax revenues going to fund the medical services plans that each province manages. However, everybody has access to the same health care system, you don’t need to worry about finding an insurer or getting approved for treatment.
The total price for us in Canada — taxes with health care, is likely equivalent to the cost in USA of taxes PLUS health insurance (unless you are unlucky enough to not qualify for health insurance or the regular plans — in which case your cost as a US consumer of health services would skyrocket…)
Dec 16, 2009
Thorough and to the point, thanks.