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I think the rate of self-injury from maintaining a car yourself would be quite a bit lower than the rate of self-injury from deciding on one's own medical treatment, and that's the reason for the different kinds of regulation.
Would it? Most of the time, when industry advocates are here arguing this sort of point, they're implicitly assuming that the use of medical professionals will drop to zero (or be banned). Thus, they're imagining the least knowledgeable person deciding on their own medical treatment. But when we look at the car maintenance world, we see the vast vast majority of low-knowledge folks still using automotive professionals. The rate of self-injury is, indeed, low, but someone needs a bit more than arguments from bad imagination if they're going to rest on a claim that the rate of self-injury would surely be "quite a bit" higher.
You hear this same shit from the realtor cartel, and frankly, any cartel that wants to maintain its market power. "Oh real estate transactions are so complicated; can you imagine how the sky would fall if we didn't get our 3% cut of every transaction?! PEOPLE WOULD BE HARMED!" You know what really would happen if you lost some of the sketchier tools to maintain your market control? First, you'd probably have to clean up your act, but second, lots and lots of people would still use you, but for your actual expertise, rather than because they think they're basically forced into it. Sure, will there be some harm that didn't occur before? Probably. But there's some harm now that wouldn't occur then, too. You need an actual argument about magnitudes rather than just imagination.
EDIT: Remember when it was every state, rather than just two states, who banned you from pumping your own gas into your car? Surely there were folks saying how risky and dangerous it would be (gasoline is flammable, don'cha'kno?) to let ignoramus individuals do it. How's that argument looking for those two states that have held on to it?
My argument is we can see how huge and insane the supplement and alternative medicine industries are, and it's good they're not allowed to use medications that actually have effects, because then they'd actually hurt people instead of just being placebos.
I don't see how you can make that conclusion. People currently take a variety of things that don't hurt them; therefore, they will take huge and insane amounts of stuff that hurts them if we let them?
Imagine that we did ban personal auto repair. You have to draw the line somewhere, so there's some unregulated space where people could go ahead and buy, like, bumper stickers, stuff that hangs down from their rear view mirror, or even vortex generators. And someone observed that folks do a bunch of stuff with their car that is stupid and doesn't provably help the car go faster, run longer, or get better fuel economy. They then conclude that it would be a disaster if we stopped banning personal auto repair, because that obviously implies that masses and masses of people would severely hurt themselves. Why couldn't we end up with the world we have now, where most people still just take their car to a professional, but some do it themselves? Yes, some people hurt themselves doing it themselves, but I don't see why we should have concluded that it would be a huge, mammoth disaster.
I would note that I think there's probably a significant difference between a label that says, "These claims about being vaguely good for your hair health or whatever are not evaluated by the FDA," while still being cognizant that the product has been evaluated for safety... and a label that says, "This product will seriously harm or kill you if taken improperly; please consult a medical professional."
They have a lot of comically false beliefs about the benefits of the things they currently take, demonstrating they're not able to correctly identify the effects the supplements have. If unscrupulous firms are allowed to market real drugs in the same way, that market will similarly not be able to discern that the real drugs don't have the claimed effects, and they'll take a lot of the real pills and hurt themselves!
People have comically false beliefs about all sorts of stuff in the world. We have not discussed what the constraints on marketing would be; I think your comment assumes that there would be none, but I think that is unlikely. So far, we've only been talking about the total ban.
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