Medical Freedom Movement

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The U.S. spends 1/7 of GDP on medical care. The U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other advanced country but has worse mortality. And while other countries are improving mortality the U.S. is getting worse.

The so-called “medical freedom movement” rejects standard medical care (vaccines, FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, surgery, devices, etc.) in favor of a vast variety of alternatives including diet, exercise and supplements which are not regulated by the FDA.

Health care is extremely complex. Many types of effective treatment are actually effective on only a fraction of patients. Evidence-based medicine is very expensive since it relies on large double-blind, multi-center research studies. These reveal that many accepted medical treatments are actually ineffective. Some that are proven to be health-promoting, such as diet and exercise, are not taught in medical school.

Medical care has been afflicted by quackery since the beginning of time. The FDA was established to at least require some vaccines, drugs and devices to prove that they are safe and effective. (At great expense to the manufacturer – clinical trials cost up to $1 billion.)

Big Pharma spends billions of dollars lobbying, political contributions and advertising but that doesn’t change the fact that we need the FDA and Big Pharma. (And the medical device manufacturers like the ones who made my new aortic valve and aorta.)

We also need manufacturers of supplements that contribute to health but are not FDA approved. Supplement manufacturers also spend big bucks lobbying and contributing to politicians. It was heavy-duty lobbying which caused Congress to exempt supplements from clinical trials and FDA-approval.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/medical-freedom-cancer-rfk.html

The Story of One Woman Who Fell Prey to the Medical Freedom Movement

By Matt Hongoltz-Hetling, The New York Times, March 29, 2025

…
While only a small percentage of people diagnosed with cancer reject standard medical care entirely, surveys have found that one in five Americans has used alternative medicine in place of conventional medicine at some point. Nearly one in three Americans has reported avoiding doctors, often owing to distrust of the medical system or a history of negative experiences.
[Full disclosure – I have treated back pain with yoga for over 30 years since conventional medicine only offered muscle relaxants and pain killers. Back pain is the largest source of disability in the U.S. – W]

The health freedom hurricane is about to envelop the entire country…

Far-right libertarians courted left-leaning anti-vaccine activists (a small but growing movement) and professional alternative healers whose culture was transitioning from New Age dippiness to a more focused entrepreneurialism.

The supplement industry was exploding at that time, thanks to the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which curtailed Food and Drug Administration oversight and made it cheaper and easier to bring junk supplements to market. …

[Full disclosure – I take several supplements, including vitamins, CoQ-10, fish oil, collagen, d-ribose and taurine. I don’t think these are junk. I take each for a specific reason and I think the results speak for themselves since even my cardiologist asked me how I stay so young. Of course, a lot of that is diet and exercise which can also be considered alternative medicine. – W]

The number of hospitals with complementary alternative medicine services grew from 8 percent in 1998.) to 42 percent in 2010… [end quote]

This is a long article focused on a tragic case of a woman with easily-treated Stage 1 breast cancer who rejected standard medicine in favor of a quack treatment. Predictably, the cancer spread and she died.

Each of us is responsible for our own lifestyle and choice of medical treatments. It’s hard to make data-based decisions when the data isn’t available in many cases. Even someone as highly educated and dedicated to research as I am needs to use a combination of data, possibly corrupted hype and common sense…and even then I use the very scientific method of keeping my fingers crossed.

I am trying very hard to keep politics out of this post even as the current administration chips away at established vaccine science and the NIH.

Having medical freedom is good – but we need more data, not less. And the lifestyle factors that are undermining American health and leading to immense chronic suffering and expense are not controlled by the medical establishment.

Wendy

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Politics is only a symptom of an American culture that I fear has become lazy and irresponsible, a description of decadence led I’m afraid by the Left. The failure of liberals is that the laudable position that Americans are entitled to good health care was not paired with recognition that such an entitlement requires personal responsibility. Socialized medicine requires living a healthy lifestyle to be affordable. The Japanese understand this social contract between citizens and the government. Americans don’t.

In addition, Americans are under the impression that information equals wisdom. That all those gigabytes of data available online is all one needs to make sophisticated medical decisions. One sees it all the time even on this board. Expertise assumed without the need of training and study. Delusions of grandeur.

For the Medical Freedom concept to work, folks have to be realistic about whether they are competent to evaluate all the information out there. That level of humility and self-awareness is rare within the Medical Freedom Movement.

Not really because an unstated but implicit definition of alternative medicine for Americans is that it be convenient and easy. Diet and exercise are hard with improvements incremental. Americans want health results without much effort.

Much easier to add crystals, megadoses of vitamins, and aromatherapy to one’s life than jogging and home cooked vegetables.

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Seriously? You find this sort of quackery most prevalent in rural, uneducated communities; I’m inundated with it here in the South. I can only surmise that you’re seeing what you want to see, because I see it everywhere - luckily in relatively small numbers - although I note the vaccination rates in many of those Texas counties where measles is spreading rapidly (you know, those liberal bastions) are approaching 80%, far below the 95% recommended from herd immunity.

But yes, it can happen to the best of them. I recall that Steve Jobs tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juices and vegetables. Didn’t turn out so great, I think.

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That phrase captures both the hippy dippy idiocy and the ice cold cynical cruel avarice of the alliances being formed.

Part of my being amongst the longest living persons with HIV (I was infected in 1979) has been an extreme reliance on Wendy’s mixture:

Danger of death, pain, and disfigurement cause extremes of fear and panic — hey ho WRONG door for both the individual and the society.

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Again, you are overly dependent on anecdote and personal experience to make your opinions. Measles was irradicated a few years ago because a high vaccination rate even among the rural uneducated allowed the US population to reach herd immunity. This is what protected susceptible groups like the Mennonites from getting the disease.

Distrust of big Pharma has been driven primarily by the educated Left as well as the anti-vax movement that originated from erroneous claims concerning autism and allegations of a coverup by big pharma. We now have lost herd immunity for measles in several states.

Your opinion seems to be biased by recent events, but if you look at the major schools of alternative medicine like Chinese Traditional, Homeopathy, India healing (Ayurveda), Naturopathy, few would seem attractive to rural, uneducated conservatives. I suspect if you went to a small town in Mississippi and suggested homeopathy, you might get slugged.

Alternative medicine is currently a $30B industry in the US. I doubt that is being paid for by your “rural, uneducated communities”. U.S. Complementary And Alternative Medicine Market Size to Hit USD 229.12 Bn by 2033 - BioSpace

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If you say so. Meanwhile actual data shows vaccination rates in the toilet in the most rural parts of the country, and highest in metropolitan areas.

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OMG I don’t know where you got that. “The educated Left” may have some adherents, but I’m here to tell you it’s the uneducated rurals (that’s Right, to you) who have embraced it full throttle.

Conservatives are more likely to believe that vaccines cause autism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/01/conservatives-are-more-likely-to-believe-that-vaccines-cause-autism/

Another;

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X211022639

Republicans, Not Democrats, Are More Likely to Endorse Anti-Vaccine Misinformation

Abstract

Vaccine safety skeptics are often thought to be more likely to self-identify as Democrats (vs. Independents or Republicans). Recent studies, however, suggest that childhood vaccine misinformation is either more common among Republicans, or is uninfluenced by partisan identification (PID). Uncertainty about the partisan underpinnings of vaccine misinformation acceptance is important, as it could complicate efforts to pursue pro-vaccine health policies.

And finally

In case you don’t punch down beyond the headline:

Republican-Aligned Americans Account for Decrease in Importance

The declining belief in the importance of vaccines is essentially confined to Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, as the views of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have changed little over the past 24 years. Twenty-six percent of Republicans and Republican leaners – half as many as in 2019 – believe it is extremely important for parents to get their children vaccinated. In the initial Gallup poll on vaccinations, Republicans and Republican leaners (62%) held similar views to Democrats and Democratic leaners (66%); the two groups now differ by 37 percentage points.

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Republicans are demonstrably more misinformed on most political issues because they trust and believe Fox. And Fox is propaganda posing as news.

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Try actually reading my statement you quoted and you will find that it is consistent with your observation. Distrust of Big Pharma has been driven primarily from the left with stuff like the anti-GMO to all-natural-is-better-than-synthetic movements, Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP being but one example. And the anti-vax movement became big time due to Andrew Wakefield’s erroneous paper linking vaccines to autism that has since been discredited.

And remember, this thread and my original post was about the Medical Freedom Movement, which is mostly about the use of complementary/alternative medicines (CAM). Only about 7% of Americans are anti-vax. About 40% use CAM. Most users of CAM appear to be educated middle-aged women (like Gwyneth Paltrow). Who Uses CAM? A Narrative Review of Demographic Characteristics and Health Factors Associated with CAM Use - PMC.

You will find a lot more alternative medicine clinics in the wealthier part of cities than you will in rural America. Chakras and qigong are much more popular in Beverly Hills than Barstow.

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I live barely 20 miles from Boulder, CO…arguably one of the World’s largest epicenters of WOO! and nitwittery, in addition to being pretty darn wealthy. Not only do they roll the antivax way for their children with outbreaks of Whooping Cough as well as sporadic measles…they tend to weasel out of rabies and parvo vaccines for their dogs.

There are also “alternative” vets who use homeopathic remedies and have been known to change the meds my daughter has prescribed for congestive heart failure back to a homeopathic regimen. I know that sounds like a corny joke if you know what homeopathy actually is but it’s not. The client apparently changed vets having lost faith in the altie one after the third episode.

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You seem to like to cherry pick facts which match your stereotypes:

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I guess I don’t write well. Allow me to clarify. I believe that the anti-vax movement achieved prominence in about 2000 with the advocacy of liberal celebrities like Jim Carrey after the Wakefield paper. California had a measle outbreak in 2015, which led to several studies as to why it occurred. Here is the conclusion from one (PBE=Personal Belief Exemption from vaccination). Affluence as a predictor of vaccine refusal and underimmunization in California private kindergartens - ScienceDirect

Our findings suggest that affluence is associated with the higher prevalence of PBEs to school immunization requirements in California private kindergartens. Further, kindergartens with higher tuition also had more students admitted without being fully vaccinated or with conditional admissions. Combined, these resulted in significantly lower vaccination coverage among schools with an annual tuition of $10,000 or more compared to both less expensive private schools and public schools.

We aren’t talking about the rural uneducated. It appears that the anti-vax sentiment began with wealthy white urban/suburban families in blue states like CA and NY, and then spread to other groups:

While vaccine hesitancy initially gained momentum among more affluent, well-educated parents, it appears to be spreading. In New York State (NYS), 25% of infants are intentionally vaccinated using individualized and untested vaccination schedules [22]. These children are geographically dispersed, suggesting that vaccine hesitancy is spreading. Longitudinal maps of PBEs in California among public school kindergarteners also show a growing prevalence and geographic spread in vaccine refusal [23]. This proliferation of vaccine hesitancy weakens herd immunity.

Back in 2014, four of the five most anti-vaccine states voted for Obama, while five of the eight most pro-vaccine states went for Romney. Are Liberals or Conservatives More Anti-Vaccine? | RealClearScience

Covid probably changed the political spectrum on vaccination so that more conservatives are now anti-vax. But I think the data suggests that the anti-vax movement became prominent because of wealthy white celebrity left-wingers. Amazon.com

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I think it’s pretty clear, there are idiots on both sides of the aisle.

In the immortal words of Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?”

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Your stats cover personal belief exemptions in private schools which comprise about 10% of the population and most of which were religious. Why do you assume that 1) personal belief exemptions for private religious school parents are likely to be liberal and 2) that high tuitions make those few more likely to be liberal and 3) that private school families speak for the 90% in public schools not subject to the study?I am going to let you have the last word because I have better things to do than spend my time battling internet warriors but your lengthy arguments appear to me to be built on a wall of false assumptions and stereotypes.

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As long as there have been vaccines, there have been anti-vaxers. Sometimes the opposition has been philosophical, sometimes political, and sometimes spiritual.

In that sense, it could be said that Edward Jenner created the anti-vax movement.

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So wealthy, white suburbanites are a proxy for liberals?

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Religious conservatism and vaccine hesitancy:

Christian nationalism and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and uptake - PMC.

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This comment is not to any particular post in this topic :slightly_smiling_face:

Bing Search equates Medical Freedom Movement with Health Freedom Movement.

Health freedom movement - Wikipedia

{ The health freedom movement is a libertarian coalition that opposes regulation of health practices[1] and advocates for increased access to “non-traditional” health care.[2]

The John Birch Society has been a prominent advocate for health freedom since at least the 1970s, and the specific term “health freedom movement” has been used in the United States since the 1990s.[3][4] }

While ‘medical freedom’ is being blamed on only one color of ideology, it (according to Wikipedia, above) had it’s roots with Libertarians.
Today, I know folks from all POVs who use alternative medicines, supplements, ‘fringe medicines’, etc.

And, as is noted in the Wikipedia article: { Health freedom is a libertarian position not aligned to the conventional left/right political axis. }

We keep being told that we (US) spend MORE for (governmentally (Healthcare industry) approved) healthcare and get poorer outcomes, than any other ‘advanced’ country.
Some famous person said something like “if you keep doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes, then you are insane”.

The Medical Freedom Movement seems to want to stop the insanity and ‘try something else, cause what we’re doing ain’t working’?

:thinking:
ralph

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Actually, we can unwrap this into more than one category.

  1. Lifestyle choices that have nothing to do with the practice of medicine but drive very expensive causes of morbidity and mortality (diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, gunshot wounds, addiction, suicide, etc.). The warped American lifestyle is the insanity, not medicine.

  2. Evidence-based medicine which actually works brilliantly in many cases. Such as vaccines, my recent aortic valve replacement, the dramatic decline in cancer mortality and many others. Would you want to go to a quack if scientific medicine has proven cures?

  3. The problems that don’t have a cure yet and which can be helped by alternative medicine such as yoga, diet, exercise, supplements, etc. These are not proven but may be helpful.

  4. Blatant quack medicine. Plenty of that around, such as anti-vaxxers or ivermectin for Covid. Now, that’s insanity.

Wendy

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Good observations, Wendy. As to point #4, anti vax sentiments have been around since the time of Jenner. Here’s a well known satirical cartoon that was produced just a few years after Jenner demonstrated the power of the cow pox vaccine. It’s interesting that, over two centuries ago, when understanding of immunology etc was at a far less sophisticated level than today, the media poked merciless fun at the credulous and ignorati but today such tomfoolery is seen as "outside the box thinking…

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We are talking about probabilities. Wealthy white suburbanites from California and New York who send their kids to expensive private schools and know about the Wakefield paper are probably college educated. Those traits trend liberal. They certainly don’t indicate rural conservatives as has been asserted. The anti-vax position is consistent with the belief that everything natural is good and anything artificial is bad. That also trends liberal. The most public spokespeople against vaccines in the early 2000s were liberal celebrities like Jim Carrey and Robert DeNiro. Robert De Niro defends discredited idea linking vaccines & autism

Liberal activists representing the all-natural, anti-pharma movement legitimized the anti-vaccination position by naively and erroneously criticizing the science. The right-wing took over the anti-vax movement by making it an individual rights issue. This has now morphed into the medical freedom movement.

The foundation for the anti-vax, anti-GMO, all-natural-all-the-time, and now the medical freedom movements is the belief that science is corrupt and unreliable. That expertise and academic credentials don’t matter. That the average person with an internet connection and Facebook access is fully capable of analyzing scientific and medical research no matter how complicated. It is the victory of the mob over the despised “elites”. It is the ultimate democracy where we believe we are all equally competent in all things. Anyone can be an influencer on any topic.

The Left is just as complicit as the Right in replacing the modernist philosophy of a reality defined by scientific objective truths to the current postmodernist world where all views are relative and equally credible. There are no truths, only opinions so the goal is not to prove something right but rather to have a majority believe.

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