[lbo-talk] putting quackery to the test

[Carrol Cox]

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