Hacker News Reader

Comment by Texasian | Hacker News Reader

If alternative medicine worked, believe me, the pharmaceutical companies would be edging in on that space.

If alternate medicine worked, it'd just be medicine.

Pharma is in that space. They don't advertise it but they love "alternative" medicine because profit margins are insane. 20 euros for 10 grams of sugar brilliant, and it doesn't even have to work :) What is not to love for the profit driven pharma.

Exactly. Alternative medicine is medicine that is either not proven to work or is "medicine" proven not to work. Should something be sufficiently proven to work, with an appropriate risk/cost/etc vs. benefit ratio, it becomes medicine.

I think this ignores the process required to get something "proven to work". Something that involves years, millions of dollars, and an insane amount of bureaucracy.

Just publishing a scientifically sound paper in ARXIV isn't enough.

Not sure which angle you're taking on this. I could respond if you'd clarify. I'll take a guess though. If you are saying the bar is too high and such treatments will never get enough money to be sufficiently proven, well, then I'd point to the over 2 billion dollars we've poured down the drain funding alternative medicine studies via the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (formerly NCCAM).

AFAIK Tom Harkin is the main guy who pushed through the creation of the agency and in the past has expressed disappointment (around 2009/2010?) that they haven't been able to demonstrate alternative medicine modalities as being effective. That hasn't led to any defunding of the agency though. It keeps trucking along, spending over $120 million dollars annually demonstrating that things we already have a good idea don't work...still don't work.

> involves years, millions of dollars, and an insane amount of bureaucracy. Think about it--20 years, over $2 billion dollars. That's a lot of time and money. They should have results to show for it.

Alternative medicine has this image of being "the little guy," and given it is less than 1% of dollars spent on healthcare in the US, it kind of is. However, that small percent is a small percent of a giant, giant, pool of money. While alternative medicine is small compared to medicine, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of money put towards it.

Should have typed "less than 2%." It is over 1%, about 1.5% with the definition NCCIH uses for what is included in alternative medicine.

Why would they edge in on a space that doesn't make money? In other words, not every medicine is profitable (eg: commonly available herb).

Commonly available herbs like tobacco? Nope, no way any business could make money through a commonly available herb

Have you seen the billions made by cranks and quacks?

Just multi-vitamins is a billion dollar industry and apart from pregnancy or perhaps vitamin D most of the claims are bogus.

Because they would sell you pineapple extract for ten times the price, and you'd buy it because it'd be covered by insurance.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescriptio...

And they would isolate the effective compounds making a more effective hybrid, claim IP and make a ton of money.

There's enough money in alternative medicine that they could fund and publish their own studies to prove it's effective. They haven't.

Doesn't really seem like they need to. After all, drugs are heavily regulated, and they're not having any trouble selling an unregulated -- and unproven -- substance. Why invite trouble?

>Why would they edge in on a space that doesn't make money? In other words, not every medicine is profitable (eg: commonly available herb).

So the companies selling common herbs are doing so at a loss?

Well, there's another aspect

Exercise, proper diet and losing weight helps with a lot of conditions (high blood pressure, blood sugar levels, sleep apnea, etc)

But of course it's easier to prescribe the latest (and non-generic available pills).

Diet and exercise are great for prevention but not so great for cures.

If you want to avoid getting cancer, then leading a healthy lifestyle is an excellent idea.

If you actually have cancer, whether because you don't lead a healthy lifestyle or you did but just got unlucky anyway, then it's too late for diet and exercise. They might still help, but what you need at this point is treatment.

Pharmaceutical companies may not do prevention so well, but this article is about what happens after prevention fails, at which point you need cures, and every pharma company out there is trying to be the next one to produce a big (and probably expensive) cure.

> Pharmaceutical companies may not do prevention so well, but this article is about what happens after prevention fails, at which point you need cures, and every pharma company out there is trying to be the next one to produce a big (and probably expensive) cure.

Pharma companies are a lot bigger on treatments than cures (how much of this is that treatments are easier to find than cures, and how much of it is that cures eliminate their own market and thus make less business sense is a matter of debate.)

> how much of this is that treatments are easier to find than cures, and how much of it is that cures eliminate their own market and thus make less business sense is a matter of debate

Only in the sense that things aren't very easy to find when you aren't looking for them. Otherwise there really isn't much debate. Nothing brings home the bacon like chronic disease.

Does that apply to cancer? With cancer, it seems like a race to kill it before it kills you, and it's not generally something that can be managed as a chronic condition.

No, it's not easier, it's what the majority of people want from their doctors. They don't want to work to be healthy.

This is by far the number one complaint from doctors about patients: they only want drugs, not health.

Important additional point - many markets (ie Europe) are cost-driven rather that revenue-driven (America). If alternative 'treatments' worked, there would be a larger push from the cost-driven markets.

It works... to make money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com