With the onset of the new year, I wanted to turn the page and start off on a new topic. However, the question of professional boundaries continues to occupy some of the lists. If discussions of this issue are intended to bring parties together, rather the opposite is happening. Arguments are being refined; lines of demarcation are being more firmly drawn; and the bulwarks are going up.
In my own observation of this field, there has been considerably more effort put into defending turf than in building the field in the first place. The number of lawsuits per capita must exceed that for any field of comparable size, and the money put into such law suits, patents, and patent defenses probably exceeds the cash invested in actual instrumentation development. It has availed essentially nothing for those who sought to restrict others. The patents succeeded at most in slowing down progress, or forcing developments underground, and at the same time the patents are most likely indefensible.
In my previous newsletter, where I discussed the issue of whether licensure actually serves to protect the public rather than the professions, I failed to raise an obvious point. If the public is at risk from a proposed new technique, then the risk to the public is surely greater if the technique is entirely fraudulent than if it is effective but may simply be poorly administered. If a technique is entirely fraudulent, then it injures by diverting an ostensibly gullible public from more effective remedies. If the public interest were truly at issue, then the promotion of an entirely fraudulent technique to the public should be of greater concern to the caring professions than the haphazard, sub-optimal administration of an effective one. In actual fact, we see the concern about the public welfare raised substantively only when it finally dawns on the professions that there is actually something here worth fighting over. The claim that this has anything at all to do with the public interest is the rankest hypocrisy. (more…)