the timboucher experience

Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About is a self-published book by Kevin Trudeau which has sold around 4 million copies in less than a year, topping best-seller lists. Reuters reports on Trudeau that he “went to prison for fraud and was ordered by the U.S. government to stop touting health products on infomercials”, but that hasn’t stopped his success.

Trudeau, who for years sold snoring remedies and memory enhancers through long-format commercials dressed up as talk shows, says he is a consumer advocate battling the “unholy alliance” of drug companies and government regulators.

“It’s all about money. The drug industry does not want people to get healthy,” he says in a commercial for his book.

Some people in the medical industry are not amused by this book’s success:

“This book is exploiting and misleading people who are searching for cures to serious illnesses,” said Teresa Santiago, who chairs the board. “From cover to cover, this book is a fraud,” she said

Funny, because the same argument could be leveled quite effectively against many accepted medical practices - that they are misleading and exploiting. Of course, I haven’t read Trudeau’s book, so I can’t vouch for it on that level, but I can certainly relate to the struggle.

“There are multiple ways to cure cancer without drugs and surgery,” Trudeau told Reuters, adding that drug companies eschew natural products because they are unprofitable.

Sounds extremely accurate to me so far… This article tackles the issue from several different angles. Aside from the flat out denial by the medical people, it also includes a nice bait-and-switch technique.

Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist who runs a Web site called Quackwatch, described Trudeau’s book as “a collection of false ideas” that included dangerous advice such as the claim that sunscreen can cause cancer so it should not be used.

“The danger of the book is it’s an attempt to shape public opinion so people don’t trust science-based health care.”

Barrett said he too was suspicious about excessive profits in the drug industry, but said it was “paranoid fantasy” to suggest they would suppress or ignore cures.

The reason I call that a bait-and-switch is that Trudeau is obviously anti-medical establishment. This Stephen Barrett guy seems to share certain aspects of that sentiment (protecting against fraud, etc), but is squarely within the medical community. Trudeau is being set up as a negative role model, and Barrett is being offered as a healthier replacement for people who feel the same way. And all Barrett needs to do to douse Troudeau is to pull out that old magical buzzword: paranoid.

To me, that’s anything but a paranoid fantasy however. Or rather, I don’t personally feel paranoid at all, and I share in it. I also don’t think it’s a fantasy. Medicine is a business - plain and simple. Businesses operate to make money. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But when a business has an opportunity to make a lot of money versus making far less money, which do you think they’re going to choose? It’s a pretty simple equation, and you don’t need to fantasize to see the truth in it. In fact, in my opinion, if you want to ignore that medicine is a business and that businesses operate according to very simple principles, then YOU are operating under an extremely deluded fantasy.

Anyway, the funny part of all this is that as much as people might decry works like Trudeau’s, that’s really only going to help him. His business model thrives on pointing out flaws in the mainstream medicine business model. Having a bunch of doctors trash him is only going to boost his sales, because Trudeau is saying they are a bunch of liars. It’s a neat little marketing trap that he’s constructed actually. And if nothing else, maybe it really will present people with alternatives to drugs, radiation and other completely devastating modern medical marvels.

• Kabbalah Water Cures Cancer?
• Barry White
• Aristotle on Nature
• To Bret re: romans knocking down statues
• No, you really don’t…