When Consumer Advocacy Hurts Consumers

Ralph Nader is a jerk. If you didn’t know that already, well, now you do.

The only good consumer advocacy is the kind that pushes for more choice for consumers, and helps them make informed decisions. Unfortunately a lot of “consumer advocacy” is really just nannyism that seeks the force of law. Rich, misguided busbodies like Nader get to feel like they’ve done a good deed, and the actual consumer gets fucked over.

There is only one person qualified to decide whether a drug’s risks are justified by it’s benefits: the user of the drug.

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8 Comments

  1. You know why my dad hates Nader? Because when my dad was a teenager he had a corvair, and he loved it, and Nader had it recalled.

    His argument was nearly identical, which is why I find this funny.

    “I should be able to decide if I want to drive a car that might explode, not some asshole who calls himself a consumer advocate!”

    I don’t disagree, I just find the similarity in argument funny. Maybe you’d have to hear it to believe it.

  2. I had a big rant about Celebrex in my livejournal last year when it looked like it might be pulled off the market. I’m at a very low risk of getting a heart attack (actually, my heart is probably the healthiest part of my body… ;p), but I’ve already had 1 bleeding peptic ulcer and have had severe stomach/esophageal issues for 13 years. In other words, in Celebrex and other COX-2 inhibitors were pulled, I’d have to resort to NSAIDs, and would most likely end up with a serious bleeding ulcer that wouldn’t heal, and might even kill me. It’s bad enough that I can’t even take 1 naprosyn on days when I hurt extra bad: I tried that once, and my stomach pain was so bad that I’ll never do that again.

    In short: I agree with you. The problem isn’t that these drugs have such terrible risks (and, seriously, Celebrex’s risks are nothing compared to Enbrel, which I’m on currently, and methotrexate, which I was on for 10 years), it’s that patients aren’t always as informed about those risks as they should be.

  3. Nader’s good years…

    …Ended sometime back in the seventies at the latest… His early work–showing that there were some fairly poor design flaws in certain automobiles–design flaws that were easily rectified with a few design changes, but which the auto industry denied existed.. (the design changes were actually as simple as affixing this kind of stabilizing bar–something that industrious car junkies designed and sold as kits for people, but which, the auto industry attacked as unnecessary)..

    With those things… Nader was actually helpful…

    But in the past twenty years, he has done nothing but shit… Now.. he is more about NADER than about anyone else… the past couple of presidential elections also help to emphasize this point…

    As for the drug pull.. I also find it despicable.. Personally, I think that the FDA is a poorly designed regulating agency and should be abolished.. What would be a lot more effective, in my view, is something like a “Federal Reserve” type evaluation agency… Something that is independent of most political pulls.. (at least more so than other agencies..) and instead of having the power to ban drungs.. basically, it’s job would be to evaluate drugs and to award certifications to particular drugs and their manufacturers.. which the public could then use to help determine whether they wanted to use a drug… Not getting a certification wouldn’t mean that you couldn’t get the drug.. only that you wouldn’t be sure of the quality or possible side effects as evaluated by a reputable third party…

    Whatcha think..

    1. Re: Nader’s good years…

      I could get behind that.

      1. Ya know…

        over the past two years.. you and I have managed, on quite a number of times, to come up with ideas for how to alter current institutions and arrangements–to the extent that we seem to be creating a model of government that both more libertarian oriented and more liberal oriented people could find some agreement in.. (accepting of course that the more fundamentalist members of each group would still snub their noses at each of us..)

        anyway.. my thought is that we need to somehow keep track of these ideas, rather than letting them fall into electronic oblivion so that to track them down we would need to do some sort of virtual archaeology…

        I’ll try to start a file for these… and maybe eventually we can create some sort of truly “Liberal/Libertarian” manifesto/policy proposal/platform…

        1. Re: Ya know…

          A Liberaltarian party to square off against the Conservatarians, eh?

          1. perhaps…

            I’m not thinking quite so short term tho… Basically, I just keep having the feeling that there are a number of ideas that exist that do represent the “liberal-ness” that exists in some members of both the “libertarians” and “democrats”…

            For example–despite are somewhat fundamental disagreements about government regulation that we’ve discussed numerous times–I bet you and I could work out a major reform of government that would, at least, be a hell of a lot better than what is currently out there…

            Of course, there would be differences… I still value public schools a lot more than you do–having been through a public school system that was excellent and even kicked the pants off of the private schools in the area in terms of math & science…

            However, do I believe that there are serious problems in public-school administration.. you bet I do.. I think that teachers need to be tested a bit more often to make sure that they aren’t slacking off… So there, I would take on that oh-so-stalwart-“liberal”-organization of Teachers unions…

            On the other hand, I do believe that if we are going to expect teachers to be elite instructors, then we should also pay them like they are.. Compare the salaries of public school teachers to those of corporate trainers, and you find a massive difference–and corporate trainers are not usually expected to deal with any kind of disciplinary problems on top of that…

            Anyway.. I’m getting off topic and I need to get off the puter and work out now before I go dancing tonight.. Anyway.. if you run across any of our other conversations that contained places of aggreement and suggestions for how to redefine government in a way that is truly more liberal–in the original sense of the word–then let me know.. perhaps I can add a webpage off of my homepage and we can start building the manifesto there..

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