I don't disagree, but academia and government (which I realize are not always separate from corporate R&D) are enormous drivers of scientific progress. There's

I don't disagree, but academia and government (which I realize are not always separate from corporate R&D) are enormous drivers of scientific progress. There's a lot of quackery out there which I think erroneously magnifies the conspiratorial suppressive power of the pharmaceutical industry. My argument is simply this: doctors need more leverage to use cutting edge research in their practice. I am not in the medical field, and I don't know exactly how to accomplish this, but must surely lose a lot of organic ground-level experimentation at individual doctor-patient mutual consent, which would generate a wealth of epidemiological data with which to move medicine forward. It deprives patients of certain medical alternatives, and doctors of part of their scientific capacity as experimentalists. The entire field of vaccinations began from an observation of smallpox immunity in the Turkish country side where folk wisdom was to rub scabs into superficial wounds of healthy children. When western doctors observed a stark decrease in the infection rate, this began experimentation that became the foundation of the modern practice. I don't think that this could be done today. The extreme counterexample is the Tuskegee experiment, but the key element missing there was patient awareness of their own participation as an experimental control.