The result was snake oil. Literally.

Regulating medicine is what got us where we are. Regulation makes it expensive. Without the regulations, you could find a medical practitioner who doesn't have big student loans and insurance to pay, and pharmaceuticals produced by some factory in China. But with the regulations, the free market is broken. "Go away and leave me alone" doesn't work for medicine any more than it works for military defense, police, interstate road systems...

Maybe with better education and access to information unregulated medicine would work now. It would probably be better than it was in the medicine show days. A quick review of my spam folder suggests maybe not. My heart wants to pick Wikipedia over the AMA, but my brain won't cooperate.

All this being said, don't get any non-emergency skeleto-muscular surgery without trying a massage therapist first. The number of people I deal with who tell me what I did helped them more than the surgery they tried first is depressing. And if I can't help, at least you have all the parts you had and no new scars. I've seen (and felt) chiropracters do good stuff too. And acupuncture, well, I don't know whether it works, but it is non-destructive and not terribly expensive, so if you don't have my aversion to needles, what the hell.