I have a very hard place in my heart for those that take advantage of poor souls in search of a cure to what ails them. From faith healers to new age spiritualists, I growl at them all – because, frankly, they hit close to home.
My wife, you see, is unable to have children for medical reasons. Because of that, and because she wishes to, she’s been the target of more smiling glad-handing then I really care to remember. Time after time, someone offers a miraculous cure for something, and she gets all hopeful – only to face the inevetable dissapointment when it falls apart or doesn’t work as advertised. If it can happen to her – a reasonably intelligent, very critical soul – I fear how often it happens to others.
The point of this particular essay is to arm you against quackery – to give you the tools you need to discern whether the new fantastic cure you’re looking at is likely to have bearing on the condition you’re dealing with. You can level this at your doctor as easily as you can that wall of homeopathic remedies. Believe me, one of them will pass our test, and one of them won’t. There are five telltale signs of snake oil. If what you’re looking into matches ANY of these signs… beware.
- Appeal to the Wisdom of the Ancients.
All humans have a facination with What Has Come Before. We are entranced and enthralled by history, and we look to it for guidance for our present actions. This is all good! However, we have a tendency to associate wisdom with age. Look at popular literature, adventure stories – heck, Indiana Jones. Ancient cultures, different and mystic, believing in ways we have laid aside today, are intriguing. Mysterious. They facinate us – we see their culture, do not wholly understand how it worked, how it came together, how they treated each other, what their lives were like, and we wonder. We wonder what they knew that we don’t, we question what was lost when their culture failed.
Can we rediscover wisdom from ancient people?
Well, yes. Science does it all the time. We discover the basis behind traditions, and we uncover whether the rituals and ungents used had real properties or were just so much mumbling and rubbing and hope.
Unfortunately, many snake oils take our tendency to honor the past and turn it into an appeal to illogic. Let me show you the difference:
The ancient Greeks discovered one modern remedy. They learned that a tea made from the bark of the willow tree was efficacious in the treatment of minor aches and pains, headaches, and inflammation. Over the intervening centuries, scientists isolated the ingredient that proved so incredibly useful: acetylsalicylic acid. Concentrated and purified, it proved even more effective.. and gained the common trade name “Aspirin”. It’s used every day to treat everything from headaches to heart attack and stroke risk. It is not, however, marketed with statements like “ancient medicines uncovered!” or “Wisdom of the ancient greeks revealed!”. It works. It’s marketed on what it does, not who made it.
On the other hand, take a look at this one, from http://herbanpharmer.com :
We carefully handcraft our herbal products in small batches, and formulate our preparations according to the ancient wisdom of Chinese Medicine. Unlike the many products on the market that focus primarily on pain relief with strong, unpleasant odors, our preparations are formulated to provide significant therapeutic value.
… these are Red Herrings. We handcraft them. And? We formulate them according to Ancient Wisdom. And? They smell good. And? These points are certainly interesting, but none of them speak for whether or not the stuff actually works, only that Ancient Wisdom says they do.
Be very suspicious.
- Unversal Claims of Effectiveness.
No medicine or technique is universally effective. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. ZERO. Medicines all do something – they have a specific interaction with the body based on their chemical makeup and your chemical makeup. Any medicine or technique that claims to cure everything is probably lying to you.A permutation of this is heavily common in the ‘detoxification’ industry: “toxins” cause all your problems, and “detoxing” cures them. Check out this excerpt from http://www.healthy.net :
Toxicity is of much greater concern in the twentieth century than ever before. There are many new and stronger chemicals, air and water pollution, radiation and nuclear power. We ingest new chemicals, use more drugs of all kinds, eat more sugar and refined foods, and daily abuse ourselves with various stimulants and sedatives. The incidence of many toxicity diseases has increased as well. Cancer and cardiovascular disease are two of the main ones. Arthritis, allergies, obesity, and many skin problems are others. In addition, a wide range of symptoms, such as headaches, fatigue, pains, coughs, gastrointestinal problems, and problems from immune weakness, can all be related to toxicity.
Toxicity occurs on two basic levels–external and internal. We can acquire toxins from our environment by breathing them, by ingesting them, or through physical contact with them. Chapter 11, Environmental Aspects of Nutrition, deals with chemical aspects of food and how they influence our lives and health. We all are exposed to toxins daily. We eat and drink them and impose them upon ourselves repeatedly and regularly. Most drugs, food additives, and allergens can create toxic elements in the body. In fact, any substance can have toxicity–water, sodium, and almost all nutrients can be a problem in certain circumstances.
This all seems logical, doesn’t it? Except – it makes very little sense, when taken in its component parts. Of course you can drown in water (and there is such a thing as Water Intoxication that can be potentially fatal) … even distilled water can be harmful! The thing is – “toxins” are not the universal bogeyman. Generic remedies are also not a cure – and taking a dozen pills a day to ‘detoxify’ certainly makes pill manufacturers rich and has very limited success.
What’s important to know here is that most people confuse Correlation and Causation – and, worse, they misunderstand their own body’s ability to heal. Simply, they take a pill, the problem goes away, and they hail the pill as the solver of said problem.
Unfortunately, that’s not often true. The human body’s ability to repair itself is absolutely incredible. Given that most medical conditions actually are “self-terminating” – that is, they would go away in time without medical intervention – it becomes very easy to make connections between unrelated actions as it subjectively seems that the pill actually did something. Correlation – you took the pill and healed – does not equal causation – BECAUSE you took the pill you healed.
Beware any panacea – any cure-all. Medicines are tailored to specific conditions; one glass of fruit juice does not cure both cancer AND arthritis. I promise.
- Nonstandard Marketing Practices
Medicines are marketed and sold as they are because it is simply the most effective way to get things that work into the hands of people that need them. While often a new product in other spheres begins as a late-night infomercial, medicine is an entirely different story.You see, pharmacies exist to make money off of your illness – this is true. The service they provide is very specific, and represents an important, profit-driven component of our medical system. I’ll be the first to tell you that corporations are in fact soulless (CVS offers homeopathic remedies, for instance) – and pharmacies are certainly no authority on effectiveness! Because of that, however, you must ask the question:
Why isn’t this being sold to everybody, through standard channels?
Look closely, and you’ll find the answer’s usually one of three reasons. First, the item is horrifically overpriced relative to other items in the same sector – e.g. Tunguska Blast’s fruit juice and juice sprays. Second, the item is no different than a product already being sold through existing channels. Third, the product is deceptively marketed, that is – it does not actually contain the ingredients it expresses or its supposed effect is too far-fetched to be believable in the context of a store shelf.
If the only way you can buy this miracle cure is through multilevel marketing or mail order, be very, very suspicious of its claims. It’s not absolutely certain that it’s worthless, but it’s a darned good indicator that it probably is.
After all, if you had something so amazing that everyone and their mother should be using it, wouldn’t you be trying to sell it at Wal-Mart?
- Overreliance on Testimonial Evidence.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say something that will probably, one day, get me lynched:Testimonials about the effectiveness of a product are utterly and completely worthless for determining the value of that product.
Period. There’s no way around this one.
If you’re on the product’s website, do you honestly believe you’re going to see negative reviews? Do you really, earnestly believe they’re even going to publish them? Worse, if “Irma” from “Washington” is telling you how amazing her experiences with CureMeGood products have been.. do you have any guarantee of this person’s existence? Any empirical evidence that, even should she exist, she’s not the site author’s mother?
So many people are taken in by so many of these false hopes that it’s not unusual to even get legitimate testimonials from happy customers that took their placebo and actually recovered.. but those testimonials are not, in any way, validatable. They aren’t good data, and aren’t good enough for you to spend money on. Most marketers will even tell you that testimonials are a questionable marketing tactic, used best in selling services and then only with full references – verifiable testimonials have meaning.
The difference is simple: if you are selling a service someone else has used, this does imply that the service is useful. However, if your potential customer can’t call up your previous customer and ask them questions about your service, they have no guarantee of the veracity of the claim you make.
Testimonials are a powerful marketing tool when used in conjuction with actual data, with verifiable clients and with supporting details. Most panaceas, however, rely on testimonials that fill pages with unverifiable gushing about how amazing the product actually is. This should arouse suspicion, not trust – if the product really worked, you really wouldn’t need all these people telling you so.
- Piling on the Red Herrings
Red Herrings are, in essence, facts that may be true but have no bearing on what it is you’re presenting. Snake Oil salesmen love to present tons of facts – “40% of men suffer from hair loss!” that may, in themselves, be true … but have very little bearing on whether the product they’re presenting you is actually useful for curing you of you troubles. Here’s a good example from my favorite snake oil over at CyberWize:
Notice that this graph, while very pretty and certainly offering a fact about medicine in general… doesn’t actually SAY anything about their own product. It is very, very true that oral sprays are absorbed faster and easier than, say, pills – but what does that have to do with whether or not their product cures you of anything at all?
Getting your fruit juice fix faster has no bearing on whether or not the fruit juice makes you honestly healthier. It’s just.. meaningless. Snake oil’s loaded down with this stuff, however, often under the FDA rules of disclosure as opposed to the stricter rules of the medical community.
And that’s it. Better armed, here’s hoping you’ll spot this garbage before it thieves cash out of your pocket.
