The price of de-naturing nature Q: Now that I've been getting your newsletter for awhile, I'm completely sold on natural medicine being the best way to achieve good health. But I do admit that the main reason I decided to look into it in the first place was purely economical -- my prescriptions were just getting too expensive for my fixed income. Even though I'm already convinced these drugs weren't good for me anyway, I'm still curious as to why they're so expensive. JVW: Patent medicine companies always attempt to justify the stratospheric prices they charge for their products by citing the enormous costs of research. But what they aren't telling you is that a large percentage of this cost is created by their attempts to figure out how to copy the action of the natural molecules that produced the positive results in the first place. In order to profit from the benefits brought about by natural molecules, patent medicine companies need to make an artificial -- and patentable -- version of the original substance. So they chemically twist, deform, and otherwise manipulate them to do a similar job. It can take quite a lot of time and resources to manipulate and, essentially, de- nature nature. That's why patent medicines are so expensive. But you've realized what the patent medicine companies never will -- that using the natural molecules to do the job that nature intended costs much less, and poses much less hazard to patients in the process. | 
