It’s not the doctor’s fault some of their patients aren’t too stable in the head.
No, but it IS the doctor’s fault if s/he responds to a patient who is expressing irrational concerns about her (or less often his) appearance, by eagerly offering to shoot the patient up with botox or collagen or surgically install synthetic tubes in the patient’s lips. And it IS the doctor’s fault if the doctor does this over and over again, with hundreds of patients, and builds his whole practice around this sort of thing, and always tells the patient how “great” the results look, even when the rest of the world is looking at these patients and thinking they look faintly monstrous.
I’m not saying patients shouldn’t be free to purchase such “treatments” or that doctors shouldn’t be free to sell them. I’m just pointing out that the AMA is more than a little hypocritical and capricious when it comes to selecting the targets of its public criticism. Fact is, the “bioidentical hormone” industry makes money for compounding pharmacists, at the expense of big pharmaceutical companies. The latter want to sell large volumes of mass-manufactured pharmaceuticals in a small choice of pre-set doses and combinations, and have doctors limited to these mass-manufactured products when prescribing or recommending pharmaceuticals.
The “science” behind giving people limited choices of say 50mg or 100mg of hormone X, is certainly no better than the science behind the custom-compounded “bioidentical” hormones. And the AMA’s claim that concern over “science” is behind its attacks on physicians and pharmacists who prescribe and provide “bioidentical” hormones is lying BS — what’s behind it is pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, which is notorious for lining the pockets of cooperative doctors and doctors’ groups.