You Are The Market

There’s an old saying regarding consultants: “If you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”

It’s kind of funny; and it’s kind of not.

Over the past few years there has been an increasing amount of distrust, skepticism, and anger regarding healthcare in general and vaccines in particular. More and more people have “opted out” of having their children vaccinated; a movement whose wake is creating a large divide between two sides:

People are concerned over mercury based preservatives, while the medical establishment assures us they are safe.

People are concerned about possible side effects of vaccines (including the fear that they may cause autism), while the medical establishment insists that there is no clinical proof of any such connection.

People are questioning the number of vaccinations that children now receive (an average of 36 vaccinations through age six, as opposed to only 10 in 1983), while the medical establishment assures us that they are all necessary.

Who do you believe? Who can you believe?

No loving parent would intentionally cause their children to suffer pain or to inflict a lifelong debilitating injury upon them, so with so many organizations (CDC, NIH, WHO, FDA, etc.) telling us that vaccines are perfectly safe, why are so many people questioning this authority?

Maybe a better question is, “Do they have a valid reason to question it?”

Consider the follow excerpt from the current issue of Forbes magazine (don’t ask me why I have a Forbes magazine; I’m not exactly sure either). The following is from an article about a new DNA decoding machine, with the author exploring its potential future:

“Cancer is the biggest near-term market. Today treating a cancer patient costs hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars. Some breast cancer patients already get a specialized gene test to help determine what treatment is right for them. If similar gene tests become routine for all 4 million cancer patients in the U.S. and Europe, as many oncologists expect, this alone could be a $20 billion market. Some patients might be sequenced multiple times as a tumor spreads and mutates.”
- Forbes magazine (pg. 72), Jan 17, 2011

It’s hard for me to imagine a more telling statement, and straight from the horses mouth, no less.

To me, that paragraph exposes the core problem with our entire healthcare system: it’s run by people who have no intention of being part of the solution. They understand – very clearly – that there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

Your health is of concern to them only if it turns a dollar, and let’s face it, healthy people don’t spend a whole lot of money on healthcare; sick people do. To put the above example into perspective, if a cure for cancer were found, a $20 billion dollar market – just for this new DNA decoding technology, mind you – would disappear. That’s a lot of money.

Regarding vaccines, how big is the vaccine market today? How much money would be “left on the table” if tens of millions of people “opt out” and stop getting them? Do you think that’s not cause for concern?

We are told that vaccines don’t cause autism, but we are not told what does cause it or how to prevent it. We are given treatments for it instead. In fact, we have treatments for everything, but not too many cures. With a cure, treatment stops. And so does the money.

You might say, “Well Blaine, those are businessmen; of course they’re only interested in profit. But the CDC, NIH, WHO, FDA, etc., are non-profit government organizations dedicated to serving the pubic interest.”

On the surface, that’s true. But who are the people running those organizations? Where do the come from?

Is it surprising to know that many of the people who work in executive positions for those organizations are “subject matter experts” who used to work in the “for-profit” healthcare field? Is it also surprising that many of them return back to the “for-profit” healthcare field when they leave those organizations?

Isn’t there a potential conflict of interest in that?

Upton Sinclair was quoted as saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

I would also suggest that it is difficult for a business to find a cure for a disease when the very existence of their business depends upon not having one.