While there are a few outright con artists, most practitioners believe fervently in their own products, focusing on the results that can be interpreted as positive and dismissing failures as unimportant. A final common source of misinformation is reports of studies or proposed studies in developing countries. It is no fault of doctors in Africa, Latin America, or the Caribbean that they may not have the medical resources available to researchers in developed nations. And it is entirely possible that serious research can be done in these places. Such people prey upon medical practitioners and patients in the third world after they have been booted out of the developed nations.
Several examples come to mind.
The track record of research in developing countries is not good, and such research has not led to promising HIV treatments now under study in developed countries. Let's look at some warning signs of questionable treatments or practitioners. Anybody charging exorbitant and unjustifiable prices for a treatment that is not undergoing serious scientific study is suspect. Careful thinking is needed here to separate genuinely promising, but expensive, therapies from those which are both expensive and unwarranted. Some unavoidably expensive but legitimately promising therapies, such as passive immunotherapy, are made unofficially available by some doctors well before trials are completed.