Time

It seems like almost every week my attention is drawn to yet another scam regarding peoples health. Now usually these are targeted at people who have relatively small ailments or cosmetic complaints. While I have huge problems with almost all of these treatments, from herbal remedies to homeopaths and naturopaths, by and large the damage these con artists are doing is purely financial, with relatively little physical effect to their victims. The people that truly sicken and disgust me are those that prey on the people out there with chronic, incurable and often fatal diseases.

First of all, they are stealing large amounts of money from these people, sometimes every scent they have and usually they don't stop at that, they'll take anything they can get from desperate friends and relatives as well. Now I hate to sound cold here, but speaking purely pragmatically, not only will these "cures" not work at all, the purveyors of this snake oil are leaving families in financial ruins, all for nothing.

Worse yet though is the sense of false hope that these charlatans are selling. To me this is the most insidious thing that is done with all these bullshit cures on the market. I know a lot of people see it a a good thing, or a least don't see the harm in giving someone hope in the face of a potential illness. I couldn't more strongly disagree. With giving people false hope, what they are also doing is stealing what I consider to be the most precious thing these people have left, time.
In the worst cases that's all these people have left, medical science has done all that it can, and they will die. Now I don't know about you, but if I knew that I only had so much time left, I'd want to spend that as much of that time as I could with those that I care about the most. But instead of doing that, these people are instead wasting that precious time in the offices of these quacks receiving bogus treatments or else chasing down the money for their next treatment. This is time all wasted in the pursuit of a hopeless dream, time, I argue could be far, far better spent.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I suffer from a chronic, currently incurable, disease. While what I have isn't fatal, it does limit my activity. Because I only have so much energy I have to be very careful in deciding what I do in a day in order to maximize either my productivity or the time I can spend out with friends. I've come to understand just how important it is to have the time to do the things you love, with the people you love.

Time really is one of the few things that each of us have in a finite quantity, and to steal that from someone, to me is one of the greatest crimes a person can commit.