The health industry has no reason to cure patients. On the contrary, they have reasons to create new patients.
And it's across the board. I tell myself exactly that when I look at my toothbrush.
A toothbrush lasts about ~3 weeks before needing replacing. I'm sure someone in the industry will tell me that it's because it's made of unobtainium unicorn hair specially designed to make my teeth whiter and all that.
I also have a another plastic brush to clean my shotguns of all things (I do a lot of clay pigeon shooting) -- the construction is identical to a toothbrush, just perhaps a tad bigger. Doesn't have the fancy colored handle.
Now the brush I'm currently using I've been using for 3 years and the brush is still pretty much pristine, after being used to generously scrub bits of sharp, grim metal once or twice a week.
Hmmm... How does that work? Better unicorns? Well, think about it, everyone is changing toothbrush on a monthly basis, that is a huge revenue. Even reducing the lifetime of a toothbrush by 5% would increase the number of brushes sold by a huge amount.
All the while, it creates fantastic amount of plastic waste. Fancy packaging and 100% plastic, possibly not even all recyclable.
> I also have a another plastic brush to clean my shotguns of all things (I do a lot of clay pigeon shooting) -- the construction is identical to a toothbrush, just perhaps a tad bigger.
Is it, though? Are the bristles made of the same material, for example? I'm guessing that bristles tough enough to scrub metal would not be the best things to use on your teeth and gums.
I had never heard that before either. I've been using the same one for like a year now, which is definitely too long now that I think about it, but 3 weeks?
The toothbrush is meant to remove a growing living substance, namely bacteria. The shotgun cleaner is meant to removal particles.
After a period of time the toothbrush too will become a colony of bacteria. It will then add to the existing problem or at least offer no benefit. This is why you should change them so often.
The shotgun cleaner is not used to remove bacteria primarily and will not suffer the same issue provided the particles/grime can be removed from it.
That's the standard reply. However, people with dentures don't change them every 3 weeks. There are perfectly sane way to disinfect/clean these sort of things on a long term basis. You could imagine leaving your brush in a cleaning solution.
Here they purposely make the brushes useless mechanically as the bristles deform to a point they are no longer usable.
This is where traditional Chinese medicine got it right : they have a culture of trying to keep people healthy. You are supposed to go to the doctor to not become sick.
It's maintenance. Not that I think it's better, but economically, you suddenly have the same goal as your clients. And that more sane.
Insistence that we should ignore the "mumbo jumbo" feels like a No True Scottsman to me. It's not as if this isn't a real thing, there's a specialist pharmacy near me selling exactly this type of snake oil to a local Chinese community, much as there's a local Polish shop selling a remarkable variety of different sausages. Except I bet the sausages actually work.
You'd be surprise how much common sense people pay to hear in some different form and name. Yin/yang, ayurveda, etc. We love creating symbolism for things grandma said to their children for 1000 years.
Beside, most reason to go to the doctor go away if you have a healthy life style.
1000 years of grandmas passing down oral history is a great source of experiment ideas, but the one about only hiring/funding people that can publish a positive result in a high-impact journal needs to get tested ASAP.
Getting rid of the useless cruft lingering around from the past is just as useful as advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
When people can stop waving crystals around and dipping their fingers in oil, they can finally get better results from pushing the big green button on an inscrutably opaque black box that goes "ding".~
They earn less money off of a cure than a palliative, but not everything the health care industry does is treating disease and the health care industry isn't one company. If one company owns the patent on a popular AIDS treatment, that would not at all stop a competitor from offering a cure if they had one. It's not company A's best interest, but it is in company B's.
And it's across the board. I tell myself exactly that when I look at my toothbrush.
A toothbrush lasts about ~3 weeks before needing replacing. I'm sure someone in the industry will tell me that it's because it's made of unobtainium unicorn hair specially designed to make my teeth whiter and all that.
I also have a another plastic brush to clean my shotguns of all things (I do a lot of clay pigeon shooting) -- the construction is identical to a toothbrush, just perhaps a tad bigger. Doesn't have the fancy colored handle.
Now the brush I'm currently using I've been using for 3 years and the brush is still pretty much pristine, after being used to generously scrub bits of sharp, grim metal once or twice a week.
Hmmm... How does that work? Better unicorns? Well, think about it, everyone is changing toothbrush on a monthly basis, that is a huge revenue. Even reducing the lifetime of a toothbrush by 5% would increase the number of brushes sold by a huge amount.
All the while, it creates fantastic amount of plastic waste. Fancy packaging and 100% plastic, possibly not even all recyclable.