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Money
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Worthless and harmful traditional remedies are rationalized
as being just "different," "alternative," "traditional,"
"unorthodox."
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There
has always been a fringe of healers, doctor wannabes, willing
to dispense information for a price. They make and sell products
with debatable or no effects, competing with proven pharmaceuticals.
All have succeeded in winning over a minority of the public
that now has firm belief in the power of supplements, antioxidants,
athletic fuel, brain food, and special diets. Bookstore sales
on health, nutrition, and medicine are high, and magazine
racks overflow.
There
has always been good grazing along the fringes of medicine.
But now wannabes are taking shark bites out of medicine's
flesh. They have perfected techniques of sales, propaganda,
legal maneuvering, and political contributing and have reached
significant levels of influence. The supplement industry,
of course, influenced Rep. Bill Richardson and Sen. Orrin
Hatch, who wrote the Dietary
Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994. The bill
liberalized marketing of supplements and removed the Food
and Drug Administration's preemptive control over unsafe products.
Companies now market products without proof of effectiveness
and flood the marketplace with unstandardized, sometimes toxic,
herbs and supplements.
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There has always been good grazing along the fringes
of medicine. But now wannabes are taking shark bites out
of medicine's flesh.
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Organized
chiropractic and other occupational guilds repeatedly seek
increased scope of practice, claiming to be able to diagnose
and treat as physicians. Political contributions from fringe
practitioner guilds regularly retool legislatures.
Private
foundations may be the largest source of "AM" funding. The
$300-million Fetzer Foundation funded the Bill Moyers PBS
TV series Cancer and the Mind and a 1993 New England Journal
of Medicine "AM" study. It still funds the Beth Israel/Harvard
and other medical school courses, postgraduate physician education
courses, departments, and research projects. The Laing Foundation
funded the University of Maryland acupuncture program. The
Rosenthal Foundation funds Columbia University's "AM" program.
The Templeton Foundation gives annual awards, funds research,
and supports other nonprofit organizations to support spirituality
and religion in medicine. Ten million dollars went to the
University of California this year from the Osher Foundation
for an "altmed" service. Endowments are in the hundreds of
millions of dollars, with annual funding exceeding the $14-20
million per year of the Federal Office of Alternative Medicine.
These
foundations are products of wealthy entrepreneurs with private
ideologies they would like to see adopted by society. Financially
strapped universities and medical schools accept these funds
under conditions not acceptable a decade ago.
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