[lbo-talk] putting quackery to the test

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Aug 12 08:02:18 PDT 2006


Whenever any useful medical procedure appears outside organized medicine, organized medicine incorporates it. There is simply no such thing as "alternative medicine," since there are no systematic relations among the huge pile of this that and the other thing that get trumpeted as "alternative medicine." It does not exist. You cannot define it. You cannot distinguish it the the jumble of procedures and medications "in the pipeline" of systematic medicine. Every so-called "alternative medicine" that shows actual promise is incorporated into organized medicine, so the _only_ kind of medicine there is is organized medicine. (*Drug companies of course include the powerful enterprises which produce and market various remedies incorrectly labelled as "alternative medicine," though they are only a particularly chaotic sub-field of organized medicine.)

Because of the gross inefficiency and often dishonesty of all capitalist enterprise, and because of the legal protections of those organized criminal institutions (drug* companies and insurance companies) which control social relations and internal communications within the area of human health, the development AND USE of organized medicine is in a continual state of chaos. This is of course an old marxist truism (order within the workplace, chaos in the economy as a whole).

In any case, since alternative medicine doesn't exist, I'm not clear what the debate is about.

Carrol



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