For this we pay "regulators"?

Excellent stuff from Ben Goldacre about how relatively few medical treatments and the like really can back up the claims in their adverts, aimed at medical professionals, with high quality research and evidence.

And for this sort of stuff we pay for state-monopoly drugs regulators, "clinical excellence" panels and similar, whose effect is to push up the costs of medical developments whilst holding back potential miracle cures and now also, it seems, letting through an awful lot of potential quackery dressed up as science.

Surely a competing market in certification could only do better.  After all, that is really just what the numerous studies highlighted by Goldacre are really doing, except that they have no real way of "monetizing" their findings as, say, competing medical insurance companies would do.  Just publishing their findings in just as obscure publications and hoping, beyond hope it seems, that someone will bother to notice.  

All the vested interests are against them - from the regulators themselves whose shoddiness is exposed, to the doctors who may now be embarrassed at having fallen for false claims, and the pharmaceutical companies who have thus far managed to get away with who knows, perhaps, murder.  This unholy alignment could so easily all be changed by real competition, and the biggest beneficiaries would be...the patients and the people who pay for their care.