Why has alternative medicine shifted right?

In the United States, alternative medicine has never really gone away, it’s just changed hands. From establishment-fearing hippies to Silicon Valley biohackers, it’s easy to write off these groups as simply deluded. However, the truth, uncomfortable as may be, is that their beliefs are often fueled by a legitimate distrust in the modern medical system.

A novel countercultural movement molded by the Vietnam War, Diogenes of Sinope, and the Beat movement a decade prior achieved stardom in the 1960s. The hippies, named after the word “hep” from African-American Jive slang, brought more than just an odor to the American cultural revolution of the 1960s; they brought pop versions of eastern and indigenous medicine and spirituality into the American limelight.

One thing that must be said about New Age medicine is that it is a ton of pseudoscience. A lot of it is based on either Ayurvedic or Native American medicine, which in some cases work and in some cases are documented pseudoscience. (Ayurveda uses lead and mercury for health!) These sources are where we tend to get our ideas of crystal hearing, chakras, auras, Mayanism, and all sorts of Zodiac nonsense.

Hippies in the 1960s were mainly utopian socialists, regardless of whether or not they said so; suffice to say they were politically left-leaning. But, nowadays, the revival of New Age medicine—to be fair, it has always been around ever since hippie culture has been absorbed into the mainstream—has seen a lot of right-wing proponents, like our current Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.

People who are in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) crowd also have a similar hatred for the “establishment,” who they see as woke and nefariously encroaching into peoples’ lives. In the CDC’s case, it is to make the American people less healthy through, say, vaccines and too-expensive medicines. So, MAHA have also developed their own systems of alternative medicine. Some are similar—consuming health food and dietary supplements, detoxing—but others are different, like advocating for anti-vaccination and citing various studies to advocate for those things. Another difference is in the use of novel gadgets, one notable instance being when Tucker Carlson had a guest on his show advocate for the use of red-light therapy on the nether regions to increase testosterone and sperm count.

Now, I think that there are a couple of reasons why these two groups of people espouse such similar beliefs in medicine, and that is a problem with the establishment. The hippies believed that the social, political, and cultural zeitgeist of the U.S. was all oppressive and militaristic, including the medical system. So, they established essentially independent phalanxes that participated in alternative forms of not only leadership, but music, and in the case of this article, medicine. 

What I think the solution for this issue ultimately comes down to is found in the issue that caused the problem in the first place: we need reform in medicine. The current medical system has garnered distrust from all sides of the political aisle, and if we are going to be real, it has led to unhealthy practices on all sides in the form of perhaps avoiding medical visits and underestimating the graveness of symptoms to avoid paying the exorbitant fees. It will be difficult to reform the people convinced by the alternative medicine crowds, but the issue should be tackled through widespread science education for all generations. 

As the education and reform work in tandem, I am sure that people will come to agree on their own personal health and we can truly make America healthy again.