Donald Trump won* the election because he told people what they wanted to hear.
Alternative medicine is growing in popularity because it tells people what they want to hear.
Of course, there’s a big difference between telling people what they want to hear and actually delivering on those promises.
He can say it as often as he likes but Donald Trump is not going to make America great again. It’s a meaningless slogan. And Trump is not going to reverse the laws of economics and bring manufacturing back to the rust belt and he’s not going to defeat ISIS because he’s smarter than all the generals and spies who have spent their lives trying to understand our complex world. I could go on, endlessly. The point is that just about anything Trump says has far more to do with what people want to hear than with what might have any basis in reality.
What Trump does for the body politic Alt-Med (which includes complementary, integrative, holistic, natural, unorthodox, fringe, unconventional, and new age medicines) does for the body itself. Alt-Med makes it seem simple but in fact you can’t “cleanse” your body of “toxins.” Unless you have a rare medical condition going gluten-free won’t help you. Again, I could go on, endlessly.
The point here is that, like Trump, Alt-Med promises something to people that they really want and that they can’t find via conventional politics or medicine. Just as the world seems to threaten us from the outside, our own bodies represent an internal and equally terrifying threat. (The paradox is that we are living longer than ever and, as Steven Pinker has shown, the world is actually a far safer place than it’s ever been before. But in both cases this is not a reflection of what we feel.)
I’m not trying to yoke Trump and Alt-Med together simply to take advantage of all the interest in Trump. (Medical journalists have been feeling a bit marginalized lately.) The key point here is that the two phenomena have important similarities and are both symptoms of broader political, cultural, and economic trends.
Trump and Alt-Med offer false comfort and the illusion of control that relieves, immediately and at least temporarily, the rampant fear and anxiety that is a hallmark of our time. People don’t understand and are afraid of the world and their own bodies and they want simple solutions that deliver the illusion of control. Fact-based reality is less important than the immediate reduction in anxiety. They embrace the comfort of doing something, anything about the feared problem. The self-confidence and aura of the charlatan— whether Trump or a Alt-Med practitioner— plays a key role in delivering this comfort, irrespective of any actual facts or content.
It is this sense of comfort that our traditional politicians and our traditional medicine are completely incapable of delivering. Because they are (more or less, or at least ostensibly) fact based, they reflect the inevitable uncertainty and complexity of our world. Liberal democracy and evidence-based medicine are better suited to incremental improvements and gradual reform. Of course there was an enthusiasm gap in the election. Hillary’s supporters didn’t imagine that she would make America great again. At best they hoped she would do a much better job than Trump and bring about a few modest improvements. Similarly, evidence-based doctors can’t promise miraculous cures. At best they can offer the benefits of our imperfect medical knowledge, and if they are honest they will acknowledge its limitations.
It is also important to acknowledge that our mainstream politicians and mainstream medicine are far from flawless or beyond criticism. Far from it. In fact, the rise of Trump and the success of Alt-Med has been fueled by the flaws of mainstream politicians and doctors, including their arrogance, their selfishness, their inability to change, their lack of sympathy for those outside their circles, their self-dealing, and much more. By contrast, Trump and Alt-Med practitioners sell themselves as a pure embodiment of the people and their desires. (It is only one of the many astonishing paradoxes of the election that so many dispossessed and marginalized people view Donald Trump as their spokesman and representative.)
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* He won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, and no one knows for sure the effect of Russia, Wikileaks, James Comey, social media, false news, or voter suppression. But even if you think Donald Trump could not have won without some or all of this help, it is undeniably true that a great many people have responded to what he has had to offer.
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Larry, great post! I’ve been pointing out the similarities between the belief in fake news and propaganda from the alt-right that led voters to embrace Trump and the fake science and propaganda that leads huge numbers of Americans to buy useless supplements and herbs to anyone who will listen since the election.
You, Larry Huston, are off base with this post. First of all, Donald Trump at least identified what needed to be changed or fixed – the major issues. Hillary had no defined platform and had such a dismal record, including security lapses that would have put anyone else in jail. If you don’t identify the issues, you can’t improve or fix them. Donald Trump did not say what America wanted to hear, he said what they needed to hear. I find it strange that you compare Trump with alternative medicine and Hillary with conventional medicine. Trump is fact based like traditional medicine. Make America great again means to improve the major issues that a President is supposed to be concerned with. That is, the security of the nation, the strength of the nation, the safety of the people, the condition of the infrastructure, the condition of the economy, the treatment of the veterans, and generally the utilization of the resources of the nation, both the people and the natural resources. It involves eliminating the regulations that hamper business and the over-involvement of Government where it doesn’t belong. The specifics are on Donald Trump’s website. You obviously haven’t read what is on it. In contrast, Hillary’s slogan of “Stronger Together” is meaningless. The same thing with “I’m With Her”. No, Hillary is like the doctor that gets free lunches and speaking opportunities from medical companies and promotes products, procedures, and medicines that are not in the best interests of the public… all for money, for personal gain. It is obvious that you haven’t gotten over the loss of the candidate you obviously supported. You also brought politics in what is supposed to be a medical blog. Hillary is more like the palliative care doctor that medicates the patient to ease the suffering until death, ignoring the cause of the disease. Trump is trying to save the patient. We don’t need more morphine-laced kool aid at this point. We need to look at the causes and the cure.
The “gentleman” doth protest too much, methinks.
right..a WELL REASONED reply is consider not worth listening too? People are so polarized by their inbred politics they simply are unable to comprehend ANOTHER choice that a majority of Americans legitimately made.
Really great post, Larry. The obvious, unstated comparison of alt-med to the “alt-right” was left out, I am sure purposefully and for the better, as it would have distracted from your point, but it fits.
Thanks, Jim. The truth is that Trump, alt-med, alt-right, Brexit, Renzi, Putin, etc etc are all part of a much larger tectonic retreat from globalization and liberal democracies. We really have no idea where we’re heading with this. Very dangerous but it feels like an entirely new historic era.
“the world is actually a far safer place than it’s ever been before”: that’s what almost everyone thought in 1913.
I’m pretty sure Pinker deals with this issue in his book. In fact, the 20th century was by far the safest and most peaceful century in human history, even counting the two world wars. But I agree that there has been an existential threat since 1945, and we can now add global warming to the list. But I still think it’s important to keep in mind that for the vast majority of us, for now, any threat to our safety is far more imaginary than real. FDR was almost right. It may not be the only thing but surely the biggest thing we have to fear is fear itself.
He is dangerous and he lied.
He won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, and no one knows for sure the effect of Russia, Wikileaks, James Comey, social media, false news, or voter suppression. But even if you think Donald Trump could not have won without some or all of this help, it is undeniably true that a great many people have responded to what he has had to offer.
YES..TOO BAD YOU DID NOT APPLY RATIONAL UNBIASED THINKING TO YOUR ‘ * COMMENT’… anyone who understands HOW our government and election process works would know this…you are “inferring” falsity and sabotage in the election of a sitting president. Shame on you! your political BIAS is showing!
Not much logic in reading beyond your opening remark.
Years ago, I had an aunt who got cancer. The doctor wanted to remove her breast. She ended up going to Mexico to cure the cancer and she didn’t need to lose her breast. But it came back… 20 years later, and she did not tell anyone in the family until she had returned from Mexico and she never had cancer again. Now I am 67 and have been diagnosed with cancer. The doctors want to do surgery and chemo DURING A PANDEMIC!!! There are people who were 32 years old and had “successful” surgery and “successful” chemo and when they got COVID, they died, when the doctors were saying “we expect him to recover.” At age 67, doing chemo would be a death sentence if I should come into contact with COVID, which is EVERYWHERE. So I did my research and found a science-based alternative treatment which uses medications that actually go after the cancer’s stem cells, which “traditional” treatments don’t do. I also changed my diet, which doctors never advise, even though it is the first thing a person should know, how diet helps determine the condition of the body. Doctors go to med school for years and are taught almost nothing about diet or nutrition. Before I had cancer my doctor told me I had to take insulin for my diabetes, but I did my research and found out how I could reverse my diabetes numbers with dietary changes and avoid the need for insulin which comes with the resulting insulin dependency. In three weeks I got my sugar from over 300 to 75 and my A1C over six months from 13 to 7.3 to 5.7. If I had made these changes some years ago I might not have the cancer, being that diabetes sets the stage for other diseases like cancer to come along. It was really my doctor insisting that I take insulin that motivated me to make these positive changes, but if I had gone along with the advice of the medical professionals, I may be headed for a COVID death after the surgery and chemo they had waiting for me.