| The hazard here is in the nature of scams and how they propagate. Let's suppose in the base case - experimental treatments are largely suppressed and difficult to access - the odds are 10:1. That's a 10% chance of significantly prolonged survival, against 90% ineffective. And some of those "ineffective", maybe ten or twenty percent, will be actively harmful: shorter survival or a nastier death. Unchecked, though, scammers will proliferate, and the odds get worse. Because incurable illnesses are, relatively speaking, very common compared to 10% shots at curing them. (If the reverse were true, we'd have eliminated many more of them with a shotgun approach). So now you're looking at 1% effective outcomes vs 10-20% harmful outcomes. And that's before we even factor money - and financial harm not just to the patient but to their family and loved ones - into the picture. Granted it's possible to imagine a much more agile approval process than the one we're lumbered with today. We may not have got the balance right between suppressing scams and approving treatments for people who otherwise have little hope. But the need to hold scammers down - and, perhaps even more so, ego-tripping quacks who have convinced themselves they're acting honestly - is real. "First, do no harm" has been with us almost 2500 years, and with good reason. |
This can't be a serious argument when the ordinary medical establishment is the thing wiping out the bank accounts of anyone who gets seriously sick, regardless of whether or not it cures them.
If people are facing death and they have money, they're going to throw the money at attempts to not die, one way or the other.
> So now you're looking at 1% effective outcomes vs 10-20% harmful outcomes.
But in this case the 10-20% harmful outcomes are in the nature of "you still died but maybe a little bit sooner" whereas the 1% effective outcomes are that you would have died and instead you didn't and lived another 50 years. If I have two months to live and there's a button I can press that has a 99% chance of making it one month and a 1% chance of making it 50 years, I'm smashing that button with no regrets.
You're also assuming we have no mechanism for detecting scams. But we do. Professionals go to school to learn science and that allows them to detect bullshit. If a substance is supposed to work against cancer by inhibiting cell growth and it's the sort of thing that could plausibly do that, it might not be a cure for cancer but it might be worth the attempt if you're going to die anyway. If a substance is supposed to work against cancer by mechanism of the astrology of Capricorn, that's a load of bullocks. So then the patient can ask a scientist they trust if the thing has any plausible mechanism of action before they waste their time or money on it.
Some of them may still be fools, but not all of them. Especially when the ones who aren't fools are the ones who are more likely to not die, which is the sort of thing otherwise-apathetic people tend to care about.
Moreover, in general "we have to kill some diligent people to keep some idiots from wasting their money" is not a sympathetic argument.