"60 Minutes" tonight repeats a medical quackery story

[Archae]

This guy who is selling stem cell "cures" for just about anything. :grr:

Recently I saw a "60 Minutes" that showed how Medicare scammers are ripping US taxpayers off to the tune of billions of $$$ every frikkin' DAY.

I also get a weekly newsletter by e-mail that shows medical scams, and quackery.

Are people simply that stupid, that they still fall for these scammers?

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. It is against the law to attempt to treat disease in this country

with snake oil unless a doctor has determined that it is ok to do so.

[Warpy]

2. People who are in pain and desperate will do just about anything

to stop hurting and/or buy themselves some time. There have always been quacks out there using the buzz words people have read in the popular press as looking promising in preliminary research to give them false hope and separate them from their cash.

Stem cell treatments are in their infancy and there's a fine line between research and quackery. While injections of targeted stem cells have produced improvements in some organ systems, they've nicely produced benign tumors in others.

Medicare fraud is different from quackery in that it is a purely white collar crime that harms only taxpayers and legitimate Medicare patients. Little attention is paid to it during GOP administrations, but that's changing.