A common sentiment in wellness spaces is that people turn to alt-med practices due to the exorbitant costs of American healthcare. While the latter is certainly true, Derek and Julian discuss why a lot of products and services in wellness land is really just another form of extractive capitalism.
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Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod.
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Yeah, we do.
Thank you so much.
And Derek, I'm glad we're diving into this today.
Yeah, it's something that's come up a lot because we're going to consider a common sentiment that we've heard for years covering the wellness space, and that's the idea that people often turn to alternative medicine due to the high cost of healthcare.
And I want to be very clear at the outset That we're discussing the American healthcare system because a lot of other nations have socialized medicine and don't experience it.
They have their own problems, but they don't have our problems.
And near the end of this brief, we'll touch upon such countries when discussing top-tier wellness influencers.
And we also know that modern healthcare here in America isn't the only reason people turn to alt-med practices, but it's an important angle that we want to dive into.
And I know that I in part agree with the premise that people turn to some of these practices because of the many problems with our system.
Yeah, I think generally I can go along with that up to a point, but I'm even going to play spoiler on that premise today.
I'll explain why in a minute.
I agree with that.
I don't fully buy into the argument, but I also know that for people with chronic issues, chronic health problems, they often look for different sorts of treatments.
I have a good friend who was trying to get pregnant, did IVF, was successful in the end, but she is not a Wu person and ended up going to a shaman in Malibu to try to get things going at some point because I understand the frustration.
So I want to be clear on that.
Yeah, so it's understandable that someone would do something like that.
For me, it's a stretch that that's because of a problem with IVF.
Yes, yeah.
Or with fertility doctors per se.
Yes, yeah, totally.
Now, where I do disagree and what we want to better understand today is this notion that wellness products are less expensive than traditional healthcare costs.
Now, they're often marketed as such, but wellness has long been advertised to and appealed to upper middle class and upper class communities.
So the point of this exercise today isn't to demonize those target markets.
Dollar trees and luxury brands serve wildly different people in different communities.
20 years ago, I taught yoga in the basement of a YMCA and then I'd go teach another class at Equinox.
So, we're not trying to pretend that disparities don't exist between classes.
But alt-med is sometimes promoted as being a more reasonable form of healing than healthcare and that's where I get tripped up because wellness can be very, very expensive.
So, I'd like to start with looking at a range of popular services against comparable modalities in healthcare and then look at what some famous people in the wellness space charge for what they offer.
But first, as we're sometimes criticized for not discussing the problems with pharma and medicine, even though we often have and that's often by people who don't actually listen to the podcast but just see our social media posts, I want to express some of my own misgivings.
Because I've had many struggles with healthcare, and I also don't want to overlook the benefits.
Dealing with cancer 10 years ago sent me back about $3,000 out of pocket, but my insurance covered the other $15,000 or so, which I'm very grateful for.
That same year I had knee surgery and that cost me a few hundred bucks, but again, the majority was covered.
So while the monthly payments can be and are right now hard, they haven't all been for nothing.
Yeah, one of my main issues with our system is having to secure healthcare on the open market.
So when lockdowns began, we had been on my wife's insurance plan for over three years.
And let's just say that now, four years later, we've had six different insurers.
And every time you change your plan, you risk having to change doctors, specialists, the whole flow.
We were on Kaiser for a while, and you can all go to Kaiser doctors.
Now we're on a different one.
We're UnitedHealthcare.
We're locked into certain hospital systems.
And the thing is, doctor-patient relationships matter, and when you're constantly switching, you just become another face in the waiting room, and you need time for trust to develop.
Now, before we get into the cost of wellness services, I'm going to be open about my own costs.
My wife and I are insured through her employer right now, and our portion of that is roughly $700 a month out of pocket.
Now, for that cost, office visits or urgent care are $30 a visit, specialists $50, emergency room visits $250, and we have a $2,500 deductible every year.
My wife also puts the maximum into her FSA, which is a pre-tax savings plan for healthcare costs, so we really pay closer to $850 every month with that deduction.
I'll also say that we've never experienced anything, until right now, like the hidden bills that arrive weeks or months after we go to Providence Healthcare System here in Portland.
This is a Catholic hospital chain based in Washington State.
And last year, they were the focus of an investigation that found that they purposefully hid costs from low-income patients across Washington.
So my wife and I are currently looking for yet another new office to go to here.
Which gets to the point.
Taking care of your health shouldn't cost this much or be this goddamn stressful.
I'm 100% for full socialized medicine in the United States.
I'm enraged by people who exploit this system for financial gain.
But that does not give license to people outside of this system to exploit vulnerable people in different but often similar ways.
Now you might not notice the similarities because of the language that influencers use, but strip away the wellness vernacular and you find that these products and services are rooted in the same tradition of capitalism as the actual medical system.
Yeah, exactly that.
An alternative to a capitalist system that is often corrupt or dishonest or exploitive, it's actually running alongside it and taking advantage of the vulnerabilities that go back and forth between these two different ways of thinking about things.
We move on to looking at the actual costs of alternative medicine because sometimes I sort of caricature it as, you know, it's framed as being the medicine of the people, the folk medicine of the people, you know, that's like it's available to everyone and it's supposedly just as effective.
I want to point out that language has such a powerful impact on how we frame topics.
So as an example, think about the rhetorical struggle between being pro-life or pro-choice.
Oops, I mean pro-reproductive freedom.
Look at that debate, right, and how language gets used.
Anti-vaxxers are savvy about this too.
They coin terms like medical freedom, when really they mean we don't want to have to take vaccines.
They try to hijack my body, my choice from the reproductive freedom movement.
Another classic that goes back a long time now is substituting intelligent design for creationism or saying that we just want to teach the controversy.
And what this does is it attempts to create a false equivalency, in that case a religious equivalency, with evolution and cosmology.
Yeah, both sides of the debate, as if it's debate.
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
So let's make something crystal clear.
The phrase alternative medicine is a misnomer for several reasons.
As is the more recently coined term complementary medicine, although that may have some legitimate application so we can put that to the side.
The concise reason why alternative medicine is a misnomer has to do with scientific method.
By definition, alternative medicine is a category for diagnosis, treatment, and prescription that has not been proven to work.
In this sense, it could be called, more accurately, speculative medicine or casino care.
Are you going to take a gamble on this?
We don't really know what's going to happen.
The moment an actual innovative or cutting edge therapy meets the standard of evidence required by medical science, it ceases to be alternative.
This means that alternative medicine as a category is always most accurately defined as un-evidenced treatment.
And here's the thing, well-established, clearly identifiable, complex forms of alternative medicine that have elaborate and usually outdated models of the body and theories of illness and healing, By that very definition, can only persist in self-contained ways because none of their ideas, beliefs, or methods have actually cleared the bar of scientific evidence.
It remains, you know, Ayurveda or Chinese medicine or homeopathy.
It stays that because it just persists in its lack of being scientifically efficacious.
But that's just because we don't have the proper measurement system.
Ah, yes.
Ah, yes.
The common trope in wellness circles is that, true to what you just said, Derek, they're just ahead of their time in holistic wisdom.
And that narrow-minded Western medicine is slowly catching up with these mystical insights from other ways of knowing that arise in other times and other cultures.
And I'm sorry, but for the most part, that's just a fantasy.
So not to put too fine a point on it, But at the top, you said that you agree that people turn to alternative medicine because of problems within our system, and you listed some things that, yeah, it makes sense that these specific problems would make people want to look for solutions, right?
But to me, the types of problems with our system that are cited by people either using or promoting alternative medicine, are misinformation and conspiracy theories rooted in an identity-based worldview, right?
And typically they'll say the alternative treatments work, but they're being suppressed by big pharma because of the profit motive.
But then if you go and do just five minutes of research, you find, no, actually they've been very well tested and they've never It's been up to snuff.
And so it's not that they're being suppressed and it's not that there's some kind of special metaphysical way.
You know, even if we didn't have the proper measuring tools, we could still see that you use the medicine and it does what it claims to be able to do, even though we don't understand the mechanism of its action.
But even in that case, it doesn't work.
I brought that up because it's a common rebuttal that I've seen in this space.
Take the meridians, for example.
We can't measure energy.
We can measure energy, but then they want a different definition of energy?
It's the kind of energy you can't measure.
We can't measure the kind that we can't measure.
It's like, well, okay, even if we can't measure it, if it was doing something, we'd be able to see it.
Right.
Even like, like if you look at the standard model of physics, there were all sorts of aspects of the standard model that we didn't, we didn't yet know existed, but we like the Higgs boson.
There has to be this kind of particle in order for the whole system to make sense.
We haven't found it yet, but here's all the ways that we see it functioning, and then eventually they found it and the whole thing coheres.
So the same with, like, subtle energies.
You need a whole lot of other supporting evidence to even postulate that there is this thing that we can't yet measure, and that's not there.
So I said before, it's an identity-based worldview.
This consists of a set of beliefs about health and nature and how medical science is too narrow or not holistic enough or lacking in a sense of mystery and magic and therefore too arrogant and pessimistic, right?
This is familiar, I'm sure, to most of us.
Some people listening may even partially agree with that, but I'm here to say it's all hand-waving bunk.
Don't get me wrong, for-profit medicine and lack of coverage for all in our society are real problems.
Yet the closest I get to agreeing on that first point is that publicized cases of actual corruption like Vioxx or the opiate crisis in the Sackler family, these feed into broader false perceptions that you can't trust medical science in general.
And that alternative medicine is somehow safer or more honest because it is intuitively categorized as being more natural.
And that's a fallacy.
So lastly here, I want to add my own experience of health insurance and for-profit medicine because I know that it's a mess.
But the thing is, I went $16,000 into debt by visiting a holistic medicine practice when I had Lyme disease almost 20 years ago now.
I didn't have health insurance at the time.
But the truth is that there wasn't much that medical science had to offer for my condition besides the standard two weeks of antibiotics and then They think that you're done with Lyme disease.
So I went and found a holistic doctor that would let me do my own research and let me suggest my own treatment protocols.
And I thought this was really fantastic.
And this practice was prestigious.
It was expensive.
It was always super busy and hard to book.
They already offered intravenous treatments in a separate large room where there were like five to ten other people sitting at any time, reading or meditating in comfy chairs with tubes inserted into their arms to get completely, you know, un-evidenced treatments delivered to them.
So for a few months, I did IV megadoses of vitamin C once a week.
I did IV hydrogen peroxide three times a week for 90 minutes at a time.
And this is all at my request, you know, and this is all based on advice that I found on online message boards about alternative ways of treating Lyme disease.
He also prescribed me antibiotics for 18 months, which is largely considered to be unethical.
I would later find out.
I spent a lot of money to buy an infrared sauna and I used that at home four times a week.
And I took a ton of supplements, ton of cleansing products.
And here's the thing, none of that would have been covered by health insurance anyway, right?
Even if I had it.
And most of it was probably me just promising money to credit card companies for no measurable benefit.
I did get better, but who knows what actually helped?
And it ended up taking me seven years to pay off that debt.
Now, in the time that I've known my wife, she's had two knee surgeries.
She's had a hip replacement.
She had a hip replacement really young.
She's had 10 days in the hospital when our child was born and brain scans on our child in the NICU because she had a really complicated birth.
And that same child after multiple visits to the ER would later have to be hospitalized for complex pneumonia when still a toddler.
My wife was also recently diagnosed with an autoimmune condition that requires specialist care and medication and we're lucky we have incredible insurance similar to you through my wife's job that saved us like 90% of the massive cost on all of that.
So yeah, we're lucky and a lot of people are not so lucky and in this society they would be ruined by that.
But there's absolutely zero alternative medicine that would have served as a low-cost option for the uninsured for any of the things that I just listed.
They just have nothing.
So it sucks that not everyone is covered.
Like you, I'm all for universal healthcare and socialized medicine, but the bottom line is ineffective placebo-based quackery is neither an effective economic or political solution to any of these problems.
Agreed.
And hopefully by now, any skeptical listeners will understand that we've gone through a lot of shit.
I have family members going through cancer right now who are going through a lot of shit with the healthcare system.
So no fans, except for the wonderful doctors and researchers and nurses who really care about their patients.
And that's also often overlooked when alt-med practitioners demonize the entire system.
Oh my God, yes.
I mean, that's so important, right?
So, we're really talking about a systemic issue and operating within that broken system are all kinds of incredible professionals who are high integrity and super compassionate and really competent.
Yes.
Danielle Bilardo, cardiologist, friend of the pod, was on our feed the other day when people were asking her questions because I tagged her.
She's very proactive on social media and Somebody asked a question about the systemic problems and she said that our system's horrible.
Like people within the system know that too.
So let's be very clear on that.
And now let's look at some of the costs of these alt-med practices.
And let's start with acupuncture.
It's a very popular modality.
The average cost of a session is $75 to $85 nationally.
to $85 nationally. It can range from $25 to $300 depending on where you live and where you go.
As acupuncture is covered by some insurance plans, some people can find
treatments for the cost of their co-pay.
When I used to go to acupuncture when I lived in New York City, it was $20.
Now, it would be a $50 co-pay, but I don't really have any faith in acupuncture now.
But I understand that some people find something in it.
Now, I wouldn't personally go because I did find it soothing.
I mean, you're in a dark room for a half an hour with soft music and candlelight and essential oils, smells good, you know, while the needles are supposedly doing their work.
But it did nothing for what I went there for.
And that was one time, multiple sessions, back pain, and another for anxiety.
And that's one of my biggest issues with acupuncture.
People say it works.
And I'm always like, okay, for what?
And I'm not saying it can't work for something.
But when I see acupuncture marketed for fertility, while I've found no evidence that that's actually a thing, my radar goes off.
Now again, if you enjoy it and you find some help, whether it's placebo or there is some mechanism of action, that's great.
I'm not dissuading you from going.
But just know that the vast amount of literature produced on acupuncture has found it ineffective for what it's claimed for, and when it produces positive results, it's often electrical acupuncture, meaning the electricity that's applied with the needles is probably what's making it efficacious.
There are few adverse effects with acupuncture, but infections are possible and they have happened.
I'll also say that of all the modalities in the broader wellness space, I've seen a number of low-cost clinics, which is very cool for the practitioners to offer.
I live a couple blocks from one here in Portland and a session could be as little as $25.
They offer a sliding scale because I live in a poorer neighborhood.
Yeah, I mean, that's nice.
to the days when acupuncture, which really did start in America on the West Coast due
to all the Asian immigrants who were coming here, was part of community health initiatives.
Yeah, I mean, that's nice.
There may be low-cost acupuncture or herbal medicine consultations in some communities,
but I still want to point out the false equivalency built into how this topic is sometimes framed.
Because if you have a condition that requires actual medical care, especially of an urgent or life-threatening nature, it's not Chinese medicine that you're going to turn to.
It's not in the same category as rushing to an actual hospital or going to see an orthopedic surgeon or treating a chronic infection.
And as you've also mentioned, the inroads that placebo-based treatments have made into medical universities by being touted as complementary or palliative treatments, partially because of clever PR and the proclivities of deep-pocketed donors who are sympathetic to these treatments, this does mean that sometimes going for needles to help with depression and anxiety or as a Hail Mary before you end up going to get that knee surgery at the end of the day, Is often covered by some insurance plans, so there is that.
Yeah, and I also want to point out that the mythology around acupuncture is strong, or I should say the myth, because mythology is a field of study.
Myths, meaning like fabrications.
The needles we use today were a Japanese invention in the 19th century.
Old school Chinese needles were basically daggers.
Acupuncture was a form of bloodletting.
So the mystical qi that moved through meridians really moved out in the form of blood, and reports say it was much more painful than what we experienced.
So the romanticized version of an ancient acupuncture practice is more indicative of Orientalism than reality, just as traditional Chinese medicine wasn't a thing until Chairman Mao gave a wide range of folk practices the umbrella term so he could market it internationally.
There you go again, ruining my romanticized notions of ancient energy medicine with your gosh darn facts.
I know, I know.
I should stop reading books.
Okay, let's turn to chiropractic because it's also high on the list here and I want to differentiate between the magical thinking straights that we've covered extensively over the years,
and sports chiropractors who use stim, massage, physical therapy, all as part of their
suite of practices to help alleviate pain.
I've had great success with chiropractic in the past, but as I've been to sports doctors and
straights, I'm going to say that I've only had success with actual therapists who take an actual holistic look,
not someone who just cracks my atlas bone and says, fixed.
I started going in the 80s and even then it was covered by insurance and that was the only way my family could afford to take me.
If you don't have insurance, a chiropractic visit will be between $60 and $200 on average, so it can definitely be cost prohibitive, especially if you're going for regular pain management.
Now, my last two chiropractors both worked with me as physical therapists so that I wouldn't have to return to them, and I was actually able to taper off and not return to them.
So, success!
I appreciate that.
All that's to say is that chiropractic can be pretty pricey, and if your chiropractor isn't doing physical therapy with you, I'd keep looking around for someone who will.
Since a PT appointment with my co-pay is $50, it's comparably priced.
Yeah, and so when we talk about, you know, both acupuncture and chiropractic, I think it's important to notice too that the treatment model tends to be that you come in with some consistency, right?
A lot of chiropractors, when you first go to see them, they're going to give you an assessment, they're going to give you x-rays, they're going to crack a bunch of things and they're going to tell you, okay, here's what's going on.
And we need you to come in four times a week for the first two months, and then three times a week for the two months after that, and then twice a week.
And it's like you're actually ending up spending a lot of money at the chiropractor.
And part of the reason for this is that because of the methods of diagnosis and treatment are kind of vague and often have, you know, unevidenced Claims or just approaches woven through them, they can really say anything they want, right?
It's very different than going through a standard medical course of treatment.
And the same with acupuncture.
I think anyone who's listening who is a fan of acupuncture would have heard what we said in the last little bit, last little segment.
And they would say, yeah, but when you go for needles, yeah, of course, you're not going as a cure for some acute condition.
You're going for the wellness.
You're going for how it balances your chi.
You're going for how it enables you to maintain health.
And sometimes they'll use the trope, I've heard this, it's probably, you know, something that someone came up with.
Uh, just off the cuff at some point, but it's, it's become part of the mythos, which is that, uh, in China, you, you pay your doctor when, uh, you own, what is it?
You don't pay your doctor when you're sick, you pay them to keep you healthy.
And when you're sick, you don't have to pay them.
Yeah.
Right.
Because their job is to keep you healthy.
Something, something like that.
And it's like, ah, I just don't know that that actually works.
Yeah, and again, this is coming from a community-based healthcare practice that was brought in China.
The folk medicine meant that when you went to the pharmacist or the apothecary, you also had people playing board games outside and you had food.
There was a different sense of what health is, which I actually appreciate, but that doesn't translate into what healthcare is in America, where it doesn't have that sort of system.
Exactly, exactly.
And yeah, some of those some of those community based notions, I think, are actually good for mental health, and they're good for community connection.
And some of the some of that have a positive impact, say on your quote, unquote, immune system.
Yes, to some extent, but it's no substitute for actual medical care.
So let me I just took a detour there.
Let me come back.
I'm no stranger to the chiropractic table.
Okay.
I think that when positioned as manual therapy, when integrated with massage and or physical therapy, as you've said, it's just one tool in the arsenal of physical rehab and it can be very helpful.
As you noted, Derek, the problem is that there are multiple schools of thought around chiropractic with some being almost like faith healing and some being avowedly anti-medical science and especially anti-vaccine.
I used to go to see this chiropractor for a while who would give me the adjustment and then he would step back and say, I just move the bone and then get the hell away from the bone and let God do the work.
There's this whole notion that like adjusting your spine would have this energetic impact on your entire being.
Some will claim that all disease can be prevented by maintaining a regular routine of chiropractic care because it's the subluxations of the spine that supposedly lead to damaged organ function and that's the root of all disease.
So buyer beware.
I probably still visit a chiropractor once every five or six years when I feel it's the only thing that might give me relief from a persistent SI joint or shoulder issue.
I then go once or twice to someone I've known for decades and it helps.
Okay, so those are two forms of all medicine.
Generally covered by insurance, which is why I wanted to begin with them, but let's move on to functional medicine, which is a catch-all term that can be used by a wide variety of actual doctors, like physicians, nurses, and dentists, and not doctors at all, like naturopaths, acupuncturists, and chiropractors.
Even more bafflingly, registered dieticians can be functional, but so can certified nutrition specialists, which is a meaningless term.
And that's why functional medicine is so hard to nail down because it's just marketing, one that claims to look for the root cause of disease, which is a bit of a diversion since all good medical professionals strive to do this.
And FM also bases its foundation in the notion that most diseases are caused by leaky gut, which is a made-up term.
So this made-up diagnosis does allow them to sell you a whole bunch of tests and supplements, which is often what happens.
Yeah, and to reiterate, it's totally just branding.
It relies on the false claim that boring old conventional medicine just treats symptoms, but functional medicine is like Medicine Plus, complete with pricey supplement regimes, dodgy diagnostic tests, and, of course, a big price tag.
Yeah, since some medical professionals can be functional, you might be able to use your insurance with them.
I want to focus on those practitioners where you cannot use insurance because they're not licensed medical professionals.
So if you want to visit a naturopath who's functional, you're out of pocket $250 to $400 for your initial visit with follow-ups in the range of $100 to $200.
One survey of 41 naturopaths in the Bay Area found the average visit was $363 with $750 being on the high end.
The pricing structure is hard to gauge because I went to over a dozen different naturopath sites for this episode and they're not very forthcoming with their free structure.
You have to send them an email first.
So, some list their service prices, but not the consultation or visit prices.
In fact, the same survey I just referenced found that 80% of naturopaths don't list fees on their website.
And I'm not trying to be too cynical, but I doubt many people go to a naturopath without being shepherded into one of their services or sold their supplements.
Yeah, so what you're saying is they're totally outside of the capitalist system and they're just doing God's work, right?
They are, yeah.
So if functional medicine doctors newly claim the mantle of scientific legitimacy plus the special source of holistic treatments that supposedly address root causes, naturopaths are like their older sibling who says, hold my herbal beer.
They usually include even more fringe treatments.
So these include acupuncture, homeopathy, restrictive diets, enemas, and a variety of questionable diagnostic methods like iridology or hair analysis or live blood cell analysis.
I'm sure you've come across this.
My hunch is that functional medicine is like a rebranded, more mainstream seeming naturopathy.
But we should be careful here to point out that naturopathy is defined, licensed, and regulated differently in different countries and even in different states within the US.
This all turns on the distinction between, on the one hand, naturopathic doctors or NDs who have studied at a school that combines some medical science education along with all of the pseudoscience we've talked about so far.
And on the other hand, mere naturopaths who don't have that depth of educational background at all.
I also want to emphasize this again.
Nearly all of the additional stuff, the medicine plus, that makes alternative medicine practitioners so sexy or mysterious by appealing to holistic principles, It's mostly offered with the claim of being preventative, rebalancing, or perhaps addressing underlying reasons for chronic illnesses that have otherwise not been improved by conventional treatment.
Let's talk about my biggest pet peeve last before we go on to the influencers.
Homeopathy.
A 2017 study in PLS-1 tracked two groups of people, one group of nearly 22,000 patients who used homeopathy for 33 months and another group who used conventional medicine, same size group.
The researchers found that the group using homeopathy incurred higher costs, which is pretty ironic given that homeopathy is by definition nothing at all.
Prices for homeopathists are all over the place, ranging from $100 to $350, but as I've noticed in previous episodes, the one I worked with was a celebrity homeopathist who charged $900 a session.
He was a friend of mine.
He only charged me $300.
Now, all the prices above are listed on various clinician and practitioner websites that I found during research.
As I hope is clear, all med practices are not inexpensive.
And besides a few low-cost options I flagged, they can be very expensive, if not more expensive than traditional care.
And yes, it's complicated and it depends on what you're seeking care for.
Well, I know that the battery of tests and specialists you might have to endure in the conventional medical system can be frustrating and expensive.
I would place equal caution on an unregulated clinic that's offering a grab bag of services like one naturopathic clinic here in Portland that I found that does hair replacement injections, Botox, IV injections, and chiropractic alongside supposed standard care.
Wow.
I'd personally rather see someone who knows their field exceptionally well than roll a dice at a holistic flea market.
Okay, so let's look at a few popular wellness influencers that have their monetization schemes down.
And to varying degrees, they all decry the Western medical system as either limited in scope to downright satanic.
And they use that fear as motivation for buying their products and services.
And while I said earlier that we were focusing on American healthcare, and the following are all American influencers, people like the former chiropractor of an ancient demon god, Joe Dispenza, that's true, sells out stadium-sized events in Switzerland at a premium price, and that nation has compulsory universal healthcare.
Bingo!
Not socialized medicine, to be clear, but still a more effective system, I would say.
Now, you can see how charismatic figures go above and beyond the promises of standard care when they do things like offering miracles, which Joe does.
His words, not mine.
Or as with a few of the others, they rely on contrarian takes to pimp their wares.
So, Joe Dispenza.
You want to go to a two-day event in Basil, $599 or $699, and that depends on if you want to sit on the ground floor or in the stands.
He has a four-day event in Dallas, $1,499, but you have to have attended an advanced retreat first to attend this advanced follow-up retreat.
Now, during this retreat, Dr. Joe will offer extensive teaching on the science and practice of coherence healing, And he will be performing three sessions at that retreat.
Now, what does that mean?
Quote, When it comes to the debate of matter versus energy, a common misconception is the belief that matter emits a field of energy.
However, contemporary research shows the contrary.
It is not matter that emits a field of energy, but rather, there is an invisible field of energy that creates matter.
It makes sense then, if you could change the field, you could change matter.
This is the principle on which countless people in our community have healed themselves.
That's what he markets it as.
He also markets that at the 7-Day Denver Retreat for $2,500, and you have had to have participated in a bunch of other ones.
And what does he offer there?
He talks a lot, you do breathwork, and you meditate.
Yeah, and so your point there is like, You have to have paid for the shorter retreats in order to be qualified, right?
To be up to speed on all of the pseudoscience that he teaches to then come and to have been indoctrinated sufficiently into the faith healing claims in order to then come to the one that costs a whole lot more.
Yeah, it is faith healing too, because he claims to have helped paralyzed people walk through meditation and breath work.
I mean, really?
Yeah, yeah.
And like through talking about this and what you were talking about a moment ago as well in terms of pricing, this is what happens when you get into the wild west of completely unregulated Alternative claims, right?
You can charge whatever you want.
You charge what the market will provide.
And you also charge based on where you are in the BS hierarchy of fame and charismatic influence and what kind of reach you have and how special people think your magic is.
Bullshit hierarchy.
Maybe that'll be the title of this episode.
So, let me briefly look at two others and then, Julian, you can wind down.
We have Melissa Sell, who I recently covered.
She's a chiropractor and German New Medicine fan turned health mindset coach.
You might remember her for calling sunburned light nutrition before she blocked us all on social media accounts, as if I don't have other accounts.
She accepts new clients who need guidance regarding your physical or emotional health.
A 30-minute call is $150, and then she can decide which course or coaching program to shepherd you into.
And if you need ongoing support, a one-hour follow-up call is $275.
I recently posted about her on our Instagram feed about her new German New Medicine perspective on sexually transmitted diseases.
She has a course for $75, and she says things like herpes is an energy Not a virus.
Okay, so finally, former hospitalist turned Gerson and functional medicine practitioner, Dr. Jessica Petras.
I covered her recently as well.
She clapped back at me and then I made another video because it was pretty funny.
She's been doing full energy scans.
Mallory DeMille has also been covering her.
She says they're based in quantum mechanics and I'm not kidding.
She says that her quantum distance healing energy machine can treat hormones, breast implant problems, mycotoxins, parasites, heavy metals, ticks, long COVID, ticks, Julian Lyme disease.
You should have found the energy first.
It would have saved $16,000.
So much more.
And yes, she means that she can wave a device in the air wherever she is from and scan you from anywhere in the world, then sell you supplements from her shop to heal your issues.
The cost?
$350 for the scan, and then you're going to get a whole bunch of supplements prescriptions.
So again, Mallory did a deep dive into the process on her TikTok and Instagram.
She sent me a sample scan, and my God, it would take a full episode just to discuss this one document.
Jess's Wellness Plus platform, you can join for $49 a month or $699 a year, which gives you access to webinars and online forums, plus her protocols and discounts.
You can access her blog articles via that.
The titles are things like, Making Amends, The Art of Crafting Apologies That Actually Work, and Tamarin, A Natural Detoxifier for Fluoride in drinking water.
She writes about psychedelics, grounding, valerian root, obesity, of course vaccines.
She sells supplements for, this one's called Big Brain for Better Focus, $62.
Another one, Puff Be Gone for Reducing Bloat, $52.
There's Thrive for Daily Pain Relief, $62, which has 50 mg of hemp extract per serving.
And as I've covered extensively, CBD starts being efficacious as 400 milligrams per serving.
Jess's supplement has no THC.
And if you know about the efficacious dose, you basically have four servings per bottle in what she's selling without THC, meaning it's not going to really do what she's saying.
There's just three influencers.
We have many more, but this is a brief.
Yeah, and I mean, that is all just straight up complete correspondence with the old tradition of snake oil, right?
It's the cure for what ails you.
And, you know, it's no different.
It's just dressed up in new clothing.
I want to just loop back around by way of closing here to the hypothesis that maybe AltMed thrives in America because of lack of universal health care.
If that was a really significant dynamic, I think we'd expect to find that in countries who do have socialized medicine, where everyone has access to real medical care, alternative medicine would just not be able to find a foothold.
So let's look at that.
Globally, the data I found says that the complementary and alternative medicine market was worth around $99 billion in 2023, and it's projected to double every four years.
Figures do vary slightly.
I'm actually quoting the lower end, depending on the source, but close to 25% annual growth as a prediction is uniform across the different studies I found.
So, let's think about a country that, in terms of a social safety net, is the polar opposite of the US.
How about Sweden?
Socialized medicine for everyone, even non-citizens in Sweden.
They have something called high-cost prevention, which makes sure no one has to pay exorbitant prices for certain, say, new medicines.
Yet the data shows that in 2017, 71% of residents in Stockholm had used Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or CAM, in the past year.
And that's up from 49% in 2001.
That number could be less significant than it sounds, though, given that they're just talking about at least one visit or using at least one product.
So here's another stat.
A 2019 study of over 14,000 cancer patients in Stockholm found that one in four of those patients also used CAM, and over half of them believe that their doctor should be allowed to recommend CAM as part of their care.
There are also really high levels of CAM use across other countries with excellent low-cost socialized medicine like Canada, Germany, and partially Switzerland.
So for me, the argument that its use is driven by a lack of low-cost access to medical care actually falls flat.
We can talk about how people are desperate to try whatever might help, or how medical science sometimes doesn't have satisfying solutions, or even how some doctors may not be as reassuring or charismatic or patient as highly motivated CAM providers are.
But at the end of the day, the economic argument really does seem to not be a significant factor.
