Laissez-faire and the meat-packing industry

[ggdwill]

Vladimir,

Do you understand the difference between a safe headache medicine and an unsafe headache medicine? Can you tell me the exact medical reasons why certain ingredients improve the condition and certain ingredients aggravate it? I sure can't. I don't know exactly why drinking two glasses of milk every day and eating 3 serving of green, leafy vegetables is good for me, but I still do it.

That level of precision is what I meant by "education" and it seems to be what you mean when you keep clamoring about creating an informed, educated population.

Yet then you keep promoting the need for "education in a general sense". Simple empirical evidence of repeated success is all the "education" the average, lay consumer needs. It's not as if the words "FDA Approved" are any more credible or precise or explanatory than "9 out of 10 doctors recommend" simply because the first was funded by tax money.

Although, if, for some anal retentive reason, a person wants to know more, they are free to seek it out. But that seems like a pretty big waste of time given that modern medicine has earned alot of scientific credibility over the last 200 or so years.

- Grant

[Vladimir Berkov]

I am not talking about education in which people learn the chemical functionality of medicines. I am talking about education in which people learn a respect for the scientific and medical PROCESS, ie the process of reason.

In using a headache medicine, for instance, by going to a doctor and getting a prescription for a drug made by Merck, you are essentially showing that you trust and value the process that made that drug available. This includes the skill and education of the doctor, the process by which Merck creates drugs, the FDA approval and trial process, etc. You trust the doctor and drug company because of the assumption that they are making drugs in accordance with these safe processes.

When you buy an herbal supplement from some unlicensed "herbal healer" with no medical degree or training, made by a company which does not need to do FDA trials or do any clinical trials at all, you essentially are trusting the herbal healer and remedy even though you know there is likely no scientific or medical basis for their efficacy.