Alternative medicine murders people

Here’s a good essay (gift link) on how the alternative medicine movement is made up of grifters and their deluded marks — as always these categories overlap — which is to say it’s just a microcosm of the contemporary Republican party:

In her quest for options outside traditional medicine, Ms. Kali found herself part of what has become known as the health freedom movement. In the past 25 years, the movement has stitched together yoga moms, flag-waving anti-maskers, alternative healers, disenchanted doctors and other fellow travelers who believe that the government has no business meddling in personal health decisions. With the installment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, what was once a fringe coalition of grass-roots activists and libertarians now controls the regulatory halls of power.

See if you can guess how this story turns out.

How did we get here? Beginning in the late 1990s, a network of libertarian organizations and donors funded health freedom lobbying groups aimed at pushing health care into the free market. The lobbying was part of the larger libertarian project to limit government and to strategically counteract the health care policies proposed by Democratic administrations. These far-right libertarians courted left-leaning anti-vaccine activists (a small but growing movement) and professional alternative healers whose culture was transitioning from New Age dippiness to a more focused entrepreneurialism.

Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay were also into “a more focused entrepreneurialism.”

Speaking of which:

Many hospitals and medical schools responded to the surge of patient interest in wellness culture by inviting in elements of the alternative medicine community, such as acupuncturists and chiropractors. (The number of hospitals with complementary alternative medicine services grew from 8 percent in 1998 to 42 percent in 2010.)

Aka the customer is always right, which in the specific context of medicine is an aphorism that ends up killing people.

The seeds of what would prove to be an enormous coup for the movement were planted in 2005, when the anti-vaccine agenda attracted an ally in the form of Mr. Kennedy. An environmental lawyer with a weighty surname, Mr. Kennedy committed to identifying the causes of chronic diseases after his son was diagnosed with a dangerous peanut allergy. For him, the battle against Big Pharma was a natural extension of the one he had been waging against Big Oil and other corporate polluters. Long concerned about environmental mercury pollution, his attention was drawn to a form of mercury used in some childhood vaccines before 2001. Mr. Kennedy, whose reputation even then was of a crusader happy to sideline facts to advance a cause, wrote an error-ridden 2005 article in Rolling Stone (which was later retracted) that blasted regulators for supposedly hiding evidence of vaccination harms.

RFK Jr. is a perfect example of somebody who has always been both a grifter and mark.

Then Covid threw everything into Dunning-Kruger Overdrive:

The Covid-19 pandemic allowed the health freedom movement to swell, spurring thousands to attend rallies protesting masks and social distancing. Mr. Kennedy drew crowds by warning of the dangers of Covid-19 vaccines. His Children’s Health Defense filed nearly 30 lawsuits between 2020 and 2024, mostly related to vaccines. The wellness industry ballooned during this time, and is now worth nearly half a trillion dollars.

As a flood of wellness products entered the marketplace, they gave cover to notorious national launches of quacky Covid cures, such as ivermectin, vitamin supplements and, most notably, the bleach-based “health drink” M.M.S. This supposed miracle supplement sent millions of dollars into the coffers of the most conniving elements of the industry (and some people to the phone lines of poison control centers).

Taking care of business, every day:

Republican leaders were already well established as supplement profiteers. Media personalities including the religious broadcaster Pat Robertson (with his “Pat’s Protein Shakes” to improve strength) and the InfoWars host Alex Jones (with his “DNA Force Plus” pills to fight toxic chemical exposures) had turned supplement sales into important revenue streams. Conservative politicians have gotten into the market, which is how we got the former presidential candidate Herman Cain advertising erectile dysfunction treatments to his email list. The Republican Party enjoyed an eight-to-one fund-raising advantage from top supplement company political gifts in 2024. Mr. Trump’s recent appointees continue this tradition in some form. Even his F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, has plugged supplements to “detox” from Covid vaccines.

All of this suggests that millions of members of the conservative base have received pitches that frame these products as tools to achieve a libertarian idyll: the self-sufficient individual who could tend to his health without the establishment.

Let us return to the locus classicus.

Only after she was gone did I realize that in the neat little narrative I had crafted in my head, Ms. Kali’s innate goodness meant that she would defy the odds stacked against her, indefinitely

Cancer is not like that.

It doesn’t operate on narratives, and it doesn’t operate according to the far-fetched theories of cure-all hucksters. It is a biological malignance best combated through the prism of medical science.

A lot of people simply don’t believe that, and they vote. That’s a problem that’s becoming recognized more and more these days.