The TV ad you’re referring to must be the AHM ad with 17 different forms of quackery. And WTF is Rolfing????????
There is only one health insurance in Australia that does not pay out on quackery. It is called something like Doctors Own Health Insurance.

Have a good one.

Uh-huh, big time. The TV ads for many health insurance companies here in Australia tout their coverage of woo-woo very proudly. Some of them sound like a roll-call of every BS treatment in existence.

People who are sick can end up costing the company money. Useless regular drugs and underachieving palliatives would cost the insurance company money, discouraging them from covering them since they don’t contribute to the well being of the insured. In contrast, a cheap treatment that eliminates the core problem would be a blessing for them, since it means one less lingering cost.

Of course, insurance companies are run by people, so they can and do make mistakes as well. They’re also profit-motivated, so they might cover quackery if they think it’ll convince more people to sign up with them and if those additional people will offset the losses associated with paying for useless treatments.

Not that most alties will appreciate the complex web of conflicting motives between different groups. They’re typically stuck in the tribalist cartoon where anyone who’s not with them must be collectively allied against them.

If CAM really treated the “root” of the problem while mainstream doctors only treated symptoms then insurance companies would have an enormous financial incentive to direct people to CAM practitioners.

If you could treat cancer, for instance, by making adjustments to patient’s diet rather than expensive surgery and medications insurance companies would have been all over it.

You can’t accuse insurance companies of being in the pocket of Big Pharma.

Since it has been over 2000 years since the original oath was written, it is not surprising that the concepts are antiquated (there is a line in it about not having sexual relations with men or women in a patient’s home – still true, but odd that this had to be spelled out). Also 2000+ years ago I imagine that doing nothing was often a person’s best option for good outcome

“In nearly every single instance, we do harm with every intervention we do. The question is, is the harm worth the benefit?”

Not only that, but we are usually thinking (or should be) probabilistically: is the potential harm (aka risk) worth the potential benefits for a given patient. We attempt to make an educated judgement about that from the evidence available (SBM) given what we know about the individual. Two thosand years ago there was no such thing as evidence or science based medicine

In nearly every single instance, we do harm with every intervention we do. The question is, is the harm worth the benefit?

Of course I am preaching to the choir here

Urban myth. Not in the Oath, farm & fuzzy as it may otherwise be.