The Alternative Medicine Multi-Billion Dollar Gold Rush

The Alternative Medicine Multi-Billion Dollar Gold Rush

By E. Stanley Ukeni

Every year, millions of desperately sick people—hoping for a medical miracle cure or an elixir of vibrant and disease free life, are seduced by the allure, and often false promise, of alternative medicine to relieve them of what ails them, or perhaps to prevent an onset of ailment.

Some are drawn to all kinds of scientifically unproven treatment proposals such as colon cleanings and zapping cancer cells with electrical current and with microwaves, use of nutritional supplements, ultraviolet blood purification—there are even those who avail themselves to the outlandish therapy that includes blood transfusion from guinea pigs, to improve and enhance their quality of life.       

The practitioners of alternative medicine range from pseudo-medical professionals—who employ treatments that are not substantiated by scientific evidence to outright untrained quacks—who prey on the credulous when they are most desperate for a cure or remedy.

Some may ask why these shysters sell untested alternative medical remedies—when they are well aware that it either does not work or that it can be harmful to the health of an already vulnerable person.

The answer is simple—greed. Unfortunately, there is a significant percentage of the world’s population that is convinced that alternative medicine works. U.S. government research shows that, in the United States alone, a whopping $30 billion—yes, billions with a ‘B’, is spent annually for treatments ranging from acupuncture to homeopathy and the sale of nutritional supplements. The numbers spent worldwide on alternative medical remedies and nutritional supplements would easily quadruple this figure.

A 2012 research study by a research team at the National Center for Health Statistics in the United States reported that about fifty-nine million Americans sought the services of alternative or complementary medical related practitioners—paying an average of $500 per person, even though there is little concrete  evidence that the remedy these practitioners are peddling actually work.

The researcher defined complementary treatments to include therapeutic treatments such as massage therapy, acupuncture, reiki healing therapy, tai chi, as well as yoga and meditation. Although there are studies to show that the above mentioned treatments can help in many ways, other complementary treatments such as homeopathy, psychic surgery, naturopathy and guided imagery were judged to be of no meaningful health value.

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Mind you, these billions of dollars being spent on alternative medicine are not paid by insurance. No, they are out of pocket expenditure, which indicates that folks are convinced enough in the value of alternative medicine to dig deep into their pockets to pay for the treatment.

Proponents of alternative medical remedies argue that these pseudo-professionals offer an alternative curative process to people who the conventional medical establishment has written off—offering them hope were they have nothing else to hold onto. However, critics of alternative medicine maintain that these untrained shysters offer nothing but false hope while fleecing their fellow citizens when they are most vulnerable.

In a country like America, where the well-being of its citizens are of a primary concern of the government, the country’s National Institutes of Health has established a unique institute to study and monitor this massive alternative health industry that many American’s trust. It is called the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.

However, in many third world countries such as exists in Africa and parts of South America, there are no effective monitoring institutions to regulate the excesses of unscrupulous charlatans who openly peddle snake oils of all sorts to the credulous victims whose only mistake is to put their faith and confidence in fraudulent claims of miraculous cure for their malady—leading to countless deaths.

Now, before any of us is tempted to assign some kind of misplaced culpability to the victims of unscrupulous peddles of worthless and ineffective alternative remedies, it should be noted that societies work because there is a collective presumption of trust among the citizenry for fairness in every transaction. If that trust is breached then the fault is on both the government—who is supposed to ensure fair-play by the governed, and the perpetrator of the deceit—for breach of social trust and such. 

     

Authored by E. Stanley Ukeni, © 2017. All Rights Reserved. This material and other articles or stories posted on this blog site may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed, in whole or in part, without prior expressed written permission from the author, E. Stanley Ukeni.

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