“Fatally undermined”? Please. Take Kevin Trudeau, who hocks his quackery books on late night infomercials. His books have topped the NYT best-seller list, and he’s probably sold 7 million copies of his books. Plug his name into Google, and the second entry is the Wikipedia article about him. The Wiki entry outlines a long history of fraud, so much so that he is forbidden by the FTC from selling anything but books. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection could do the research in 10 minutes for free. The problem is, people don’t.

Better yet, plug “quack” into Google. The first hit is QuackWatch. Now, I don’t agree with everything QuackWatch has to say, since I do buy into the low-carb, high-animal-fat diet. But most of QW is incredibly invaluable reading, perhaps even more than anyone could sit down and do. It’s right there, but people want to believe and won’t do 15 minutes of research.

Of course, I oppose government intervention into medicine, on deontological anarchist grounds. But I can’t deny that the advance of medicine in the last 100 years – under the guiding hand of the state, mind you – has been miraculous.