Want to scam some money from people with quack medical products?

The Science-Based Medicine blog provides a steady flow of debunking information about "alternative" medicine scams, aka, quack medicine.

Steven Novella has a useful and entertaining post Quantum Snake Oil – A Primer 01/15/2014 about the various forms of woo (a term for unproven esoteric claims, as in "woo-woo") we commonly run into these days in the alternative medicine branch. He suggests a "thought experiment":

... for the sake of this thought experiment let’s assume that you have no morals, ethics, or conscience. You are comfortable lying to people, even if they are sick, and even if it will harm their health.

Your task is to get as many people as possible to believe that small bits of plastic can improve their health and treat their symptoms. This is not as difficult as it may at first appear, and the payout can be huge. Small plastic stickers can be mass produced for pennies. The primary investment will be creating and maintaining a website. Then, if you can get people to believe that the plastic stickers are magical, the money will come rolling in.

He then recounts several common techniques that quacksters to make phony health claims while staying technically on the right side of the law. Some of the most notable ones:

All natural: Whatever else we claim, we’ll sell our magical stickers as "all natural." People have been primed to prefer everything "natural." We don’t have to worry about how to define the term, it’s not regulated. And to boost this effect we can scare monger about drugs and chemicals. We can tell people they don’t want chemicals in their bodies, even though they are made of chemicals – trust me, this will work.

Endorsements: ... Or we can find some celebrity endorsements. For some reason the public will listen to celebrities, even when they have absolutely no training or background relevant to their endorsement. In fact – they are famous for being successful in an industry based upon fantasy and pretending. Don’t try to make sense of it – just know that it works.

Testimonials: People are more likely to believe other people than scientific data. This one is not optional – we need to have plenty of testimonials with "real" people saying how wonderful our product is.

I think that for most people who use these things, in the end it's more for inspiration or fun, and not as a serious cure for a serious disease.

But "alternative" medicine definitely has its dark side. And the dark side is often the most profitable, especially with fraudulent cancer cures. Some of them bilk big money out of scared, often terminally ill patients and their families. And people with have cancer cases for which real medicine has a high likelihood of successful treatment will sometimes opt for useless "alternative" treatments until their disease becomes far more difficult to treat with real medicine.

That's why skeptical sites and publications like Science-Based Medicine are so important. They provide vital information and insight into medical scams that can and do cause real harm to people.

I'm very much in favor of people taking a critical attitude toward their real medical providers, asking questions and learning themselves health and treatment issues. But it should be done from reality-based sources, not from scamsters or faith-healers.

Tags: alternative medicine

Creationism, quack medicine and the solidarity of the conmen, the gullible and the superstitious

Jann Bellamy in CAM and Creationism: Separated at Birth? Science-Based Medicine 11/01/2012 takes note3 of the affinity between advocates of CAM (complementary and alternative medicine), aka, medical quackery, and Creationism:

I imagine some of those who promote CAM diagnostic methods and treatments would be perfectly happy being associated with Intelligent Design or any of its previous iterations, such as creationism. After all, if you think all interpretations of how the world works are equally valid you are not likely to quibble with the idea that God created the earth in 6 days any more than you would argue with acupuncture’s meridians and qi. And some CAM providers are so deficient in scientific training we can well imagine they might view the creation of man from clay as a plausible explanation of human evolution. On the other hand, if you are in, say, academic medicine, you would likely bristle at the idea that you have anything in common with an ID [Intelligent Design creationsim] proponent. Even some of those in the Health Care Freedom movement, who endorse the concept that all treatments, no matter how implausible or ineffective, should be available to anyone who wants them, would probably draw the line at the notion that their arguments are no better than those which supposedly support ID.

She notes the religious/superstitious basis of creationism, even when it's pretending to be science. (One thing often misunderstood about Christian fundamentalism is that it insists on being scientifically legitimate, though its image of science is typically a grotesque caricature.)

ID, on the other hand, is exclusively a fundamentalist Christian concept, although with variations within that single ideology. (Mainstream Christianity does not reject evolution as an explanation for the origins of life.) As explained on the NCSE website, which I highly recommend, there are several types of anti-evolution creationists with differing points of view. (Below is but a rough summary and may somewhat conflate the various subtypes in the interest of brevity.)

Originally, anti-evolution creationists argued that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Thus, if the Bible says that God created the sun, moon and stars on day four of creation, then that is exactly what happened. That was fine as long as those views were confined to religious settings. But the creationists wanted to go further by banning the teaching of evolution and teaching creationism in public schools. Here they ran into trouble in the form of the First Amendment and courts consistently held that creationism is religion, not science, and could not be taught in science classes. The creationists regrouped and invented "creation science," which argued that the creation story is actually supported by good science. That didn’t fly as an end-run around the Constitution so they came up with Intelligent Design, which attempts to expurgate creationism of all religious language. ID argues, as the name suggests, that science supports the existence of an Intelligent Designer (code for God) and that Darwinian evolution (which is, after all, "just a theory") is full of holes so, by default, ID correctly explains the origin of life. [my emphasis]

I first saw the bumper sticker "Gravity Is Just A Theory" in a photo with Pete Seeger somewhere.

Tags: alternative medicine, creationism, pseudoscience

Arlo Guthrie is a Republican?

Well, technically, he apparently is. He also has a blog which he occasionally updates, the most recent occasion being last week on 07/21/09 with 2 Cups Of Coffee or My 2 Cents (the permalink to the individual post isn't working as of this writing; but also right now that post shows up at the link, which is to arlo.net.)

I stumbled on this via a post by Ron Radosh at Pajamas Media (Hey Arlo! The Times They Are A-Changin’ 07/26/09) who quoted from this interview with Deborah Solomon, Just Folk New York Times 07/21/09, the same date as Arlo's post. Radosh is one of those former leftists who has spent most of his life being a former-leftist rightwinger warning any one who will listen about the dangers of The Left. The work of those folks is typically pretty dreary. That one post of his is a good example of why. He was snarking about Arlo's having become a Republican: "Anyway, Arlo, congratulations for your courage in telling the world about your political affiliation. Should you prepare for some contentious moments during your next concert with Pete Seeger?"

But if you read Arlo's own post, dated five days before Radosh's, you might wonder if he's saying he's become a Republican as a gag. Does this sound like a typical Republican to you?

So what was up with [with the Republicans] interfering in matters of who can marry who? That's a big invasion into personal freedoms and liberties. Those who try to control our personal lives are not only not for traditional Republican values, they're not even really for American values. The way I view it, the state has no business in the house let alone the bedroom. The way I would resolve the current controversy would be to insure that secular marriage be open to anyone. And that religious marriage not be infringed upon by the state - to marry or not as their traditions permit. Both religious and secular marriages would be acknowledged as it is now. That, to me, should be the Republican position.

He does say some things more along the "libertarian" line. He makes a couple of comments that sound like they come from an alternative-medicine advocacy position. Some of those people are no-regulations-for-business Republicans, so maybe that influenced him. One of the things he says is, "The march has already begun around the world to outlaw the use of natural medicines - vitamins, minerals, herbs, and other plants so that you will become a criminal and a law breaker when you try to care for your own family in your own way."

I don't want to see such things that are actually useful and healthy banned. I do want to see them better-regulated. But many substances that people actually use as medicines are sold as "food supplements" and therefore don't have to go through FDA screening for their medicinal value. And I haven't seen new consumer reports on this lately, but quality control on herbs and food supplements in the past has been pretty bad. I doubt this improved much over the eight years of the Cheney-Bush administration.

The whole concept of "alternative medicine" is flawed. There is medicine that works, and medicine that doesn't. The effectiveness of an "alternative" treatment can be tested and verified just like those of "conventional" medicine (aka "allopathic medicine", "school medicine", etc.) It's a more than legitimate goal of the government to protect people from patent medicine scams.

Tags: alternative medicine, arlo guthrie