Choose Your MedicinePub Date : 2021-10-21DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0002
Lewis A Grossman
{"title":"Storming the Bastille of Orthodoxy","authors":"Lewis A Grossman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"After describing orthodox medicine and its alternatives in early America, this chapter discusses the rise of country’s earliest medical licensing laws, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These schemes strove to exclude unorthodox practitioners from the medical profession. American arguments for freedom of therapeutic choice were born in opposition to these original licensing systems. The chapter examines in detail the medical liberty advocacy of Benjamin Rush, an influential Founding Father who was also the most prominent American physician of the early national period. The chapter analyzes the genesis during this time of various strains of medical freedom rhetoric that would persist, to varying degrees, throughout American history.","PeriodicalId":278107,"journal":{"name":"Choose Your Medicine","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134027329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Choose Your MedicinePub Date : 2021-10-21DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0011
Lewis A Grossman
{"title":"The Right to Be Covered","authors":"Lewis A Grossman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the paradoxical assertion of freedom of therapeutic choice in the context of reimbursed health care. Cries of “rationing!” and “death panel!” are directed at every suggestion of a limitation on government insurance coverage. This chapter traces the history of the notion of a “right to be reimbursed” for one’s therapeutic choices since the 1930s. It explores the persistent public insistence on “a right to choose one’s doctor” in insurance plans. It describes the history of drug formularies and patients’ resistance to them. The chapter focuses most intensively on the controversy surrounding the FDA’s November 2011 withdrawal of provisional approval of Avastin for the treatment of breast cancer. Conservatives and patient groups used the language of rights to attack this decision even though it did not remove the drug from the market; the protesters’ real fear was that insurance plans would stop reimbursing patients for this use.","PeriodicalId":278107,"journal":{"name":"Choose Your Medicine","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122059100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Choose Your MedicinePub Date : 2021-10-21DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0007
Lewis A Grossman
{"title":"The Spirit of the ’70s","authors":"Lewis A Grossman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how in the 1970s, freedom of therapeutic choice advocacy, previously the domain of right-wing extremists, became bipartisan and mainstream. It examines how various cultural trends contributed to this trend, including a loss of trust in orthodox medicine, government, and other establishment institutions; a “rights revolution” (including the rise of patients’ rights); and the emergence of the women’s health movement. The chapter shows how Americans’ use of alternative remedies surged during this period and discusses in detail two 1970s social movements in favor of alternative treatments: a successful rebellion against the FDA’s attempt to regulate vitamin and mineral supplements more stringently and a campaign to resist the FDA’s ban on Laetrile, an alternative cancer treatment derived from apricot pits. The chapter also describes how American courts briefly seemed prepared to elaborate the holding of Roe v. Wade into a generalized right to freedom of therapeutic choice.","PeriodicalId":278107,"journal":{"name":"Choose Your Medicine","volume":"16 4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131453489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Choose Your MedicinePub Date : 2021-10-21DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0006
Lewis A Grossman
{"title":"Conspiracy Theorists and Con Men","authors":"Lewis A Grossman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190612757.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the 1930s through the 1960s, an anomalous period of American history in which the people’s confidence in major national institutions was at its peak. Most people trusted government health regulators, the medical establishment, and pharmaceutical companies to do the right thing. Consequently, medical freedom of choice activism occurred mainly on society’s margins, voiced by peddlers of fraudulent products and right-wing cranks. The most persistent and cantankerous promoter of medical freedom during this period was the National Health Federation (NHF), the publisher of “Health Freedom News.” This organization, founded by manufacturers of dietary supplements and quack medical devices, resisted FDA regulation of alternative treatments, as well as the fluoridation of municipal water supplies. Although the NHF sometimes exemplified paranoid, Red-Scare politics, it also employed more conventional libertarian arguments of the sort that infused medical freedom rhetoric in other periods of American history.","PeriodicalId":278107,"journal":{"name":"Choose Your Medicine","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127880730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}