Why “Expensive” Often Doesn’t Equal “Quality” in Health Care

I sometimes marvel at hugely beneficial, and often inexpensive, health ideas I’ve picked up over the years, and even wonder how my life might have changed had I known about them sooner. Chinese herb detox treatments. The green vegetable juice drink that increases my energy level. Colostrum to build up immunity.

I was reminded about such techniques as I read Linda Diane Feldt’s wonderful primer on relieving menopause symptoms (commenting on my most recent post). Now, maybe because I’m a man, I haven’t heard of Motherwort and Black Cohosh, but I suspect many women haven’t, either.

She argues that bioidentical hormones should be seen as a last resort among herbal-food remedies. The reason they are pushed right up ahead of the less powerful herbs is that the less powerful herbs have less powerful proponents. It’s the problem she identifies as “the promotion of drugs and herbs and supplements by the people who directly profit from them.”

I don’t know how you get around that problem in a capitalist society such as ours. It would be nice if the government at least helped in the education effort, but it can’t/won’t because its key officials have been bought off or are graduates of the corporate establishment themselves. In other words, the small pharmacies that push bioidentical hormones because that’s what they have to sell are working from the same incentives as Big Pharma.

This phenomenon helps explain why many of the powerful inexpensive remedies never get tested to the satisfaction of the science establishment’s control-group criteria. There’s not enough money to be made from such remedies, so there’s no financial backing of studies that would document their efficacy. The old chicken-egg routine.