Medicine from the opposite
Experts assessed the market of dietary supplements, healers and herbalists
Irina Reznik, Mednovosti
The less accessible official medicine becomes in modern Russia, the more citizens prefer to fight illnesses on their own. According to expert data, almost 50% of our compatriots prescribe antibiotics for colds themselves, about 95% store such medicines in home medicine cabinets. The love of Russians for self-medication is also satisfied by numerous representatives of "alternative medicine", offering all kinds of "health products", dietary supplements, healing services, as well as "educational" literature.
The scale of the economy of "informal healthcare" cannot be accurately estimated. But, according to experts, the markets that provide patients with an alternative to official medicine have a multibillion-dollar turnover. These estimates are also confirmed by the results of a study conducted by the Khamovniki Social Research Support Foundation. The working group was made up of HSE employees and students of the Perm branch of the HSE, who conducted more than 370 interviews with experts, representatives of "informal healthcare" and consumers of their services in Perm and 16 settlements of the region. They also collected and analyzed a lot of data from open sources. The researchers tried to describe all the variety of alternative ways to fight diseases and the socio-economic relations developing around them. As a result, scientists were able to identify the main strongholds of informal medicine.
PharmaciesFirst of all, people who, for some reason, do not want to go to the polyclinic, but generally believe in classical medicine, turn here.
According to pharmacists, from a quarter to half of all pharmacy visitors come to them for advice. In addition, pharmacies serve as the main sales channel for dietary supplements, which, by the way, are often prescribed by doctors themselves instead of or under the guise of medicines. According to IMS Health, pharmacy sales of dietary supplements in 2013 in the Russian Federation amounted to more than 37 billion rubles in retail prices. For comparison, the volume of the shadow market of dietary supplements (through network marketing, online stores, outbound trade) in our country is comparable in size to the legal one and amounts to about 35 billion rubles (the report indicates a dollar figure of one billion). At the same time, pharmacies (especially round-the-clock ones) are engaged in servicing alcoholics and drug addicts, the report says. Monitoring organized in one of the Perm pharmacies showed that about 40% of visitors on a day off were just such people
Network marketing companies (MLM, multilevel marketing)The network pharmarketing industry positions itself as an integral health maintenance system, an alternative to the public health system.
With its own sales channels, diagnostics, preventive work, media, doctors, spiritual teachers. Only in Perm there are more than 35 MLM companies specializing in health products. According to the data of the Direct Sales Association, in 2013 MLM firms belonging to the association sold "health products" in Russia for a total of 19.5 billion rubles. At the same time, the quality and safety of most drugs and devices distributed through MLM have not been officially confirmed.
Outbound trade: "guest performers"There is a constant demand for the services of "guest performers" – dealers in medicines and drugs who come to small settlements from other cities.
Often such "guests" pre-advertise in local newspapers. The profit of merchants is high, and the responsibility is minimal. The state turns a blind eye to "guest performers" – law enforcement agencies have neither the desire nor the resources to understand their activities. Revenue per hour of trading can be 20-50 thousand rubles, mainly due to regular customers. In one day, the "guest performers" travel around several cities. Most of these individual entrepreneurs are from other regions, which prevents the supervisory authorities from monitoring their activities.
Folk healingThere are almost no people in Russia who "work" with clients' illnesses with the help of "psychic abilities" or magic, and at the same time are officially registered.
For example, there are officially five such people in the Perm Region. The bulk of illegal "healers" are rural "grandmothers", healers, chiropractors. There are quite a lot of people among them who took up this practice after special courses in the 1990s, but many start working with a stock of knowledge gleaned from popular literature on folk medicine. There are almost no magicians, clairvoyants and "certified" healers in reality, they exist only in advertising and TV shows.
HerbalismThere are only a few people who professionally use herbs for treatment.
Herbalists selling medicinal herbs in the bazaar mainly draw information from popular newspapers and brochures like the Herald of Healthy Lifestyle, and do not use some hidden knowledge of traditional medicine inherited, the study claims. Most often, "healers" sell the surplus of what was collected for personal needs, the authors of the report found. Prices for herbs depend on the place of sale: in tourist places (near sanatoriums, monasteries) they can be two to three times higher than in the city market.
"Educational" literatureNo less profitable than the alternative treatment itself is the replication of information about ways to maintain health.
According to researchers, it is the market of printed products that plays a systematizing role in "informal healthcare". Thanks to him, the author's health-improving teachings, systems and techniques are spreading, many of which are becoming fashionable, and sometimes even a shade of sectarianism appears in them. According to TNS research, in December 2013 – April 2014, the all–Russian audience of one issue of "Medical Letters" was 866.9 thousand people, "1000 tips" – 1.4 million, "Oracle" – 2.2 million, "Home Doctor" – 1.5 million, "Health" magazine - 2.14 million. The most successful book publishing project since the early 1990s in this area remains the publication of books by Grigory Malakhov. Their total circulation is estimated at 20-30 million copies, that is, his works are actually in every second family. And thanks to television and the Internet, the information markets serving self-treatment practices today have a nationwide scale.
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According to experts, "informal healthcare" in Russia has flourished against the background of the failure of the official one. According to Simon Kordonsky, chairman of the expert council of the Khamovniki Social Research Support Foundation, under the Soviet regime, the health of the population was "nationalized and distributed in the system of specialized healthcare institutions." With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, this system also disappeared. "Today, people are trying to find a way out – to get access to resources that could support health," the expert notes. "Informal healthcare arose against the background of unwillingness or inability to obtain these resources from the state." At the same time, "representatives of informal practices (for example, network marketing companies) benefit due to customer orientation, accessibility and lack of public confidence in official medicine," adds Yulia Krasheninnikova, an expert at the HSE Municipal Management Laboratory.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru17.11.2014