> I asked Morris why he never took his hiccup research further. “Why did we never do a clinical trial? Well, you know, we got busy,” he said. “But also, how would we do a clinical trial? Who would pay for it? There’s no drug we can sell. Nobody will invest the money and hire all the people and do all the regulatory paperwork, because there’s no money to be made.”
Our health-care system is not designed to promote free cures. Patent laws allow innovators to profit from the discoveries they make or inventions they create, but only if those discoveries or inventions can be packaged as a product that enables some form of commercial gatekeeping. SSMI has no such market potential: It can be described in a couple of sentences, and copyright doesn’t cover it.
It’s hard to suppress the feeling that the crucial difference between SSMI and HiccAway is that only one of them can be monetized. I don’t at all think Seifi is motivated primarily by profit; he seems rightly proud to help people avoid a major minor nuisance. And he worked exceptionally hard for years to make the HiccAway straw a success.
But with that same motivation, could someone have done the same for the breathing technique? Maybe, for all the challenges of building a successful company, publicizing valuable but free information is even harder.