3/4th of people are obese or overweight, the average Joe walks like 4k steps a day, people, at large, don't give a shit about health until they get a terminal diagnosis

You're talking about prevention, but this is about cure / treatment.

Once you have already have Alzheimer's, exercise isn't going to save you.

If not, why not?

So while there are lots of excellent reasons to stay active into old age, it's not a replacement for treatment.

But my point isn’t so much about willingness to pay for such a treatment, but ability to pay for such a treatment.

My understanding is that some treatments like this are sometimes not covered by insurance, so only high income individuals are able to afford them.

On the other hand, long-term care often is covered by insurance, and the insurance is more affordable.

There is plenty of data that shows that people are bad judges of their future opinions. “If X happened to me, I wouldn’t want to live anymore” often turns out to not be true.

That makes it questionably whether consent years or even months ago implies consent now.

And yes, that is very problematic in cases such as Alzheimer’s where people cannot consent now.

I'd say that depends on how effective something is. If a treatment makes significant changes to most of the patients, you can have sufficient effectiveness proof before you're halfway done with the phase 1 safety trial.

Or scam artists putting sawdust from a "special tree" into a bottle, and saying it cured his aunt, so it will cure you! If you look at the history of such things, it's just a constant battle against people being fleeced out of money.

Con artists (and some of these wear lab coats and are quite professional in appearance and speak) know that desperation means easy prey. It's disgusting, but there it is.

And it wasn't just a little problem. It was a huge problem. If the legal framework we have in place was torn down, you'd see all that re-emerge in a second.

I agree that there should indeed be a way to balance snail oil salesman techniques, with the choice of someone in a dire circumstance. I did once read that there are FDA approved methods to get in on early stage/pre-clinical trials. These are targeted for people with severe conditions. People aren't being heartless here.

But at the same time, loved ones will litigate to get money back from scam artists. This also includes going after doctors or facilities or anyone willing to enable such actions. And if treatments go sideways, and no one validated that it was anything more than made up gibberish? The lawsuits will fly then, too. The cops may follow.

And it should be this way

Truth is, you are free to imbibe and consume anything you want. No one can really stop you. And whatever method is being used here, I'm sure you could replicate it, buy the hardware, and so on. You are free to do this.

It's just that no one wants to help.

So you are free.

The regulation is to ensure a working marketplace - which is fundamentally a collection of humans interacting.

The regulation is to prevent predictable abuses of market power.

This is not available to you yet. Their drug, their choice.

There’s also a FDA provision for treatment of last resort. If you’ve got a terminal condition with no approved treatment and there’s a possible treatment of unknown safety and effectiveness you can apply and get that treatment.

If you or a loved one has Alzheimer’s I highly encourage you to request this treatment. You’ll be risking unknown side effects and or death, but it will generate data for those who come after and could advance the treatment of this terrible disease by a decade.

As a practicing clinician, I must express significant reservations regarding therapeutic agents emerging from China, particularly those rooted in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). In the absence of rigorous, peer-reviewed validation through randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted under Western regulatory standards, such interventions are frequently met with skepticism within the medical community. The prevailing perception among Western practitioners is that TCM-based therapies often lack robust empirical evidence, bearing a conceptual resemblance to homeopathic modalities, which are similarly contentious due to limited mechanistic clarity and inconsistent clinical outcomes. When considering novel pharmacotherapies developed in China, especially those in early-phase clinical trials or lacking approval from regulatory bodies such as the FDA or EMA, the Western medical establishment tends to approach them with caution. For instance, a colleague proposing a TCM-derived treatment would likely feel compelled to provide substantial reassurances to counter the inherent skepticism surrounding its efficacy and safety profile. This is not to dismiss the potential of such innovations outright, but rather to underscore the critical need for transparent, reproducible data to substantiate claims of therapeutic breakthroughs, particularly when these agents remain confined to regional use without broader dissemination in Western markets.

I used to wonder why drs never comment on this site and I'm starting to understand why