Yes that is their purpose now. My statement is more in if we lived in a world where we had the luxury of asking these questions or if the snake oil men had a much harder time existing.
The existence of them right now is just going to happen because it’s serves the purpose of keeping a certain group of people safe while being able to use as a weapon against different groups that are not the in group. But this happens with almost evey structure under captalism and fascism. In regards to snake oil, it’s a very hard thing to get rid of when the very system is a system of snake oil. So most positions of authority are always double sided. That’s not even getting into the complicated nature of snake oil and the medical industry being horrible.
I think alternative medicine will still exist in a post-capitalist world as it did in the pre-capitalist world because there are people who genuinely believe in this shit without any evidence. It is the job of regulatory authorities to test them and notify the public.
I think alternative medicine is so popular partly because the medical system abandons many sick people by being too expensive or simply unavailable. Lack of access to regulated healthcare legitimises alternative healthcare.
While most of alternative healthcare is a scam, there are legitimate treatments that work, and have not been implemented into regular healthcare. My experience, having a rare illness that has a proven treatment which insurance refuses to cover and specialists will therefore not get trained in, means I have to get my treatment from people who have been trained through an alternative circuit. It’s more risky and I wish I could get treatment through the official system but this is literally the only way for me to get some quality of life back. There are several illnesses out there with similar cases. Usually the people who treat me have the same illness and were forced to train themselves because there was no one else who could help them with their own illness.
This is often the case with ‘invisible’ illnesses like chronic fatigue. Research funds for invisible illnesses that greatly impact quality of life and can lead to slow death is negligible compared to illnesses such as cancer that can progress very quickly and can very visibly disable someone.
Chronic fatigue will slowly remove a person from social life, with friends and family thinking you just don’t want to see them anymore because they think being ‘tired’ just means you don’t want to spend the energy you do have on them. Most people won’t notice that you are actually sick, and think you’re lazy. So you slowly retreat to your home, and die a slow death while nobody notices it because doctors have already turned you away as they don’t think you’re sick and your family and friends have forgotten about you because you stopped showing up for them.
It prevents people from dying of curable diseases due to consumption of snake oil.
Yes that is their purpose now. My statement is more in if we lived in a world where we had the luxury of asking these questions or if the snake oil men had a much harder time existing.
The existence of them right now is just going to happen because it’s serves the purpose of keeping a certain group of people safe while being able to use as a weapon against different groups that are not the in group. But this happens with almost evey structure under captalism and fascism. In regards to snake oil, it’s a very hard thing to get rid of when the very system is a system of snake oil. So most positions of authority are always double sided. That’s not even getting into the complicated nature of snake oil and the medical industry being horrible.
I think alternative medicine will still exist in a post-capitalist world as it did in the pre-capitalist world because there are people who genuinely believe in this shit without any evidence. It is the job of regulatory authorities to test them and notify the public.
I definitely agree with that.
I think alternative medicine is so popular partly because the medical system abandons many sick people by being too expensive or simply unavailable. Lack of access to regulated healthcare legitimises alternative healthcare.
While most of alternative healthcare is a scam, there are legitimate treatments that work, and have not been implemented into regular healthcare. My experience, having a rare illness that has a proven treatment which insurance refuses to cover and specialists will therefore not get trained in, means I have to get my treatment from people who have been trained through an alternative circuit. It’s more risky and I wish I could get treatment through the official system but this is literally the only way for me to get some quality of life back. There are several illnesses out there with similar cases. Usually the people who treat me have the same illness and were forced to train themselves because there was no one else who could help them with their own illness.
This is often the case with ‘invisible’ illnesses like chronic fatigue. Research funds for invisible illnesses that greatly impact quality of life and can lead to slow death is negligible compared to illnesses such as cancer that can progress very quickly and can very visibly disable someone.
Chronic fatigue will slowly remove a person from social life, with friends and family thinking you just don’t want to see them anymore because they think being ‘tired’ just means you don’t want to spend the energy you do have on them. Most people won’t notice that you are actually sick, and think you’re lazy. So you slowly retreat to your home, and die a slow death while nobody notices it because doctors have already turned you away as they don’t think you’re sick and your family and friends have forgotten about you because you stopped showing up for them.