We see in movies that snakeoil salesmen, selling all sorts of things, were a horrible problem and people would have all their money lost if the government didn’t come in and do something about snakeoil salesmen.
Were snakeoil salesmen that much of a problem in the old west?
I ask this because, now we have gone so far in the other direction, we have the FDA shutting down people who even talk about how they cured their cancer or cured other people’s cancer without drugs or radiation.
There are laws that started in California and have spread all across the US that make it illegal for doctors to treat cancer with anything other than surgery, radiation and drugs.
I am sure there were instances of people selling “Snake Oil”, but these folks were using fraud to sell their product and should be subject to penalties accordingly when their products get judged by an arbiter to be ineffective. There were also very well run companies like Pfizer and Merck and some others who spent large amounts of their capital ensuring that their reputations were intact so they could keep their current consumer base.
What happened over the years with the advent of the FDA has been a shift from consumers of therapies using their judgement and confidence in a drug, medical device or therapy provider to using the FDAs judgement. The results have been awful. The companies close to the FDA have slowly pushed the FDA to eliminate competition through regulation. And they have also worked with the legislatures to build a system so bureaucratic that it now costs billions to create new devices, drugs and therapies. So now the FDA has gotten rid of most external competition and is focusing on getting rid of the only internal competition left which is coming from therapy providers and other alternative medicine providers.
Nixon delcared “War on Cancer” and over 39 billion went to drug companies to research “poison treatments” such as more radiation and drugs. As far as I know (which is not very far), none of the money was used to research nutrtition based treatments.
The result of this war on cancer was in some years later, some 270,000 people died of cancer, and some years later that number doubled.
Who would have guessed that? You would think governments get good effiecient results.
: )