> Our society's morbid, irrational fear of quack medicine

It is not an irrational fear.

Brandolini's Law applies: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

The only way to prevent quackery is to cut it off hard before it gets started.

Wakefield demonstrated the disaster that happens when you don't.

(And if you have been reading this site for very long, you know the experimental treatments are already around--we're not currently lacking for possible cancer treatments. The problem is finding the trial. Then the problem is getting people through the process and then getting them to the trial. See: "Please be dying, but not too quickly": https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...)

Even if I grant that argument, what I've described isn't even quackery. It is legitimate medical research and experimentation, and what doctors in olden times would call a "heroic" intervention -- but, sadly, now this sort of thing has become collateral damage in the war between medicine and quackery. And patients are the ones who die and suffer because of it.