The Shameless Snake-Oil Health Gurus List is composed of Joe Mercola, The Food Babe, Natural News, Suzanne Somers, Jenny McCarthy and Gwyneth Paltrow, with a sprinkling in of Dr. Oz. Sadly these are just the tip of the iceberg. Alternative medicine and quack science has become ubiquitous and its practitioners are found in big cities and small towns. What their clients don’t realize and most people don’t know are the clever, underhanded manipulations employed. Below are just 13 areas where people seeking help for various health conditions are taken advantage of.
Scientific
Illiteracy
The majority of people are not very knowledgeable or educated when it
comes to basic science and the complex workings of the human body. Alternative
medicine takes advantage of this and makes numerous claims that are
unsubstantiated and easily proven to be false. The uninformed consumer will
listen to a long list of bogus claims and never realize he/she is being lied
to.
Lack of
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is rarely taught in schools and most people barely
have an idea as to what it is. Alternative medicine joyfully and deviously
loves this. For example, when alternative medicine gurus are publicly shown
facts and evidence as to why their beliefs are bogus, they don’t bother to
refute the points – because they can’t. Instead they use ad hominem attacks on
the skeptic, making up nonsense of his being a secret agent of Big Pharma. The
sad part is the guru’s followers don’t realize this because they have no
concept of critical thinking and are eagerly looking for a hero to solve their
health issues.
New Age Mysticism
Most alternative medicine gurus believe in
creating your own reality and have no sense of objective truth. They advocate
thinking with your emotions and intuition rather than with your mind. This
leaves their followers wide open for all kinds of unsubstantiated claims. Andrew Weil
and Deepak Chopra are the two kingpins of this, but there are many others. Pseudoscientific
health products and philosophies are easily marketed because the soil is fertile
for any magical, New Age claim that can be cleverly packaged.
Blame Game
Some of these gurus are smart enough to get off scot-free when their
remedy fails. They place so much emphasis on the patient’s belief and positive
outlook as essential for the healing, that when the remedy fails, it is most
certainly the patient’s fault, not the gurus’.
Follow the
Money
Most of alternative medicine forms associations and are able to cobble
together significant amounts of money for slick, expensive ads on Facebook,
Twitter, Google Ads as well as traditional marketing like radio, TV, newspapers
and magazines. Also, celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Suzanne Somers have a
platform that reaches many with their pseudo-scientific claims and products. The
numerous skeptics in the various media that expose the charlatans don’t often
have the money reach all the duped people. It’s an uphill battle because even
in alternative medicine, money rules.
Man on the Moon Fallacy
“We can put
a man on the moon, but we can’t cure cancer?”
Alternative medicine gurus absolutely love promoting global, treacherous
Big Pharma conspiracies because it feeds right in to their claims. The Perfect
Solutions fallacy is happily used – there HAS to be a cure for cancer,
therefore evil governments and corporations are covering it up for monetary
gain. Mistrust of traditional authority – sometimes earned, sometimes not –
results in a Wild Wild West of conspiracy and deceit. Anything goes, everybody
lies, except for alternative medicine gurus, who heroically stand for freedom
of choice, even when the choice has no intelligent, rational, or scientific
backing.
Preying on
the Desperate
Alternative medicine gurus, especially those who attempt to treat
serious diseases like cancer, know they have a willing, eager and desperate
audience. Basic common sense evidence is not needed. The patients are hanging
on their every word as if it were coming from God Himself. When at deaths door,
the anxious and despairing will accept almost any hope, and there are predators
lurking around with saliva dripping from their mouths, ready to finish off
whatever is left of the perishing.
Nostalgic For The Country Doctor
The bygone era of country and city doctors
visiting patients in their homes and displaying compassionate, bed-side manners
has made many nostalgic. They rightfully yearn for a more personal approach
from modern medicine. Alternative medicine provides this, often providing a one
hour appointment instead of the 7 minute consultation from the busy doctor with
a packed waiting room.
Unproven treatments such as naturopathy,
homeopathy, acupuncture, herbal medicine, essential oils, chiropractic
medicine, and many others, benefit greatly from this more personal approach.
Most of the positive results are from the well-documented and powerful placebo
effects. Patients believe the treatment will work, and sometimes it does. The
empathetic personality and charisma of the practitioners also influences patients
to report results more positive than they actually are, not wanting to
disappoint. Thankfully, changes are slowly coming in modern medicine:
Hospitals push physicians to improve their
bedside manners …. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/hospitals-push-physicians-improve-bedside-manners
Reliance on
Anecdotes and Testimonials
All alternative medicine advocates rely on anecdotes and testimonials to
offer their version of “evidence” for their treatment. This is because this is
all the “evidence” they have. Personal experiences and subjective biases should
only be a starting point to find and treat the health condition, not the end
proof. A well-worded summary is from Rational Wiki:
“It is
impossible to say that an individual anecdote is representative and it is also
impossible to actually detect the real cause of the anecdote. For instance,
with life-saving medical treatments (say, pills that reduce heart-disease and
subsequently lower the death rate), there are some deaths that occur whether or
not the medication was taken. Therefore, if someone who is on the medication
dies, you cannot tell if they would have died anyway without it — you
can't prove that the medical intervention worked, or not, from the one case
study.
“It is very
rare for an intervention to be, by itself, a sufficient cause of
something. Rather, they tend to change the probability of a given event occurring.
This means, obviously, that one can cherry pick examples that show something
does or does not work, regardless of what effect it actually has.”
Confirmation
and Selection Bias
Advocates of alternative medicine shrewdly utilize confirmation and
selection bias to “prove” their claims. Only positive and supportive accounts
are glowingly used in their promotions and the negative ones are trashed. Once
again from Rational Wiki is an excellent example of this practice:
“Let's assume 1 million people (1,000,000) decide to take some
ineffective remedy to cure their cancer. Let's further assume (for the sake of
argument) that only 0.1% of this million will experience spontaneous remission
(the actual remission rate, for breast cancer and basal cell carcinoma at
least, is closer to 20%), and that 0.3% were misdiagnosed and so do not
actually have cancer. This makes for a total of 0.4%, or 4000 people. Now, 4000
people translates into a lot of testimonials, resulting in ‘Alternative
medicine cured my cancer’ claims in blogs, Internet comments, newspaper
articles and real-life word-of-mouth, so this makes an extremely positive
impression for the therapy. But the other 99.6% died and so are not around to
leave any testimonials, positive or otherwise. Thus, even in a hypothetical
scenario that assumes statistically very low false positive rates, the quantity
of false positives is nevertheless numerically quite large. In reality, the
number of past and present cancer patients relying on alternative medicine is
much larger than one million, and the false positive rate is significantly
higher than 0.4%, making the possibility of a given supposedly successful ‘cancer
cure’ anecdote being a coincidence even more likely.”
The
Fallibility of Human Memory
Alternative medicine “doctors” are quick and eager to take advantage of
the prevalent fallibility in people’s memories, especially when it comes to
personal health. In many cases the patient has a desire to please his friendly
doctor as well as not want to admit a mistake in seeking alternate treatments.
Both the patient’s selective memory and normal bad memory is cleverly exploited
by the practitioner. All his advice and treatments are coming up roses, without
a thorn or weed in sight!
Steven Novella, MD, an academic clinical neurologist at the Yale
University School of Medicine, writes about the unreliability of memory in
diagnosing patients:
“Medical students quickly learn that one of the biggest challenges in
taking a medical history is that people are poor historians, which a polite way
of saying that human memory is terrible. Anecdotes largely depend upon an
individual’s memory of their illness and treatment. This introduces many new
variables. There is, for example, a tendency for people to conflate different
events in their memory into a single event, or to combine details from various
events. There is also a tendency for details to evolve over time to make a
story more clean and profound. So people may, in their memory, exaggerate the
severity of their symptoms prior to treatment, exaggerate the response to the
treatment, clean up the timeline of events so that improvement began very soon
after a treatment (rather than before or long after), forget other treatments
that were taken, distort what they were told by their various health care
providers, etc. I have had countless opportunities to compare a patient’s
memory of their illness and treatment to the documented medical records, and
the correlation ranges from poor to completely wrong.”
Correlation Between Vaccination and Diagnosis
Many alternative medicine practitioners are at
war with vaccines and have an easy time duping people who don’t understand that
correlation does not mean causation. Because most children are on a vaccine
schedule of 2, 3 or 4 timer per year, and many genetic diseases appear in those
early years, it’s not too much of a stretch for some people to think the
vaccine caused this horrible condition to their child. Considering the millions
of children being vaccinated periodically and the large number of children
developing genetic diseases, how could there possibly not be a time frame when
large numbers of kids get vaccinated close to the time they were diagnosed?
It’s simple arithmetic. Anxious parents see the vaccine as the cause when it is
merely a correlation. Alternative medicine seizes on this unsubstantiated and
irrational hysteria to discredit conventional medicine and paint themselves as
the family’s saviors.
Just one example has to do with neurological
disorders:
“In modern
society, a potentially serious adverse event attributed to a vaccination is
likely to be snapped up by the media, particularly newspapers and television,
as it appeals to the emotions of the public. The widespread news of the alleged
adverse events of vaccination has helped to create the urban myth that vaccines
cause serious neurological disorders and has boosted anti-vaccination
associations. This speculation is linked to the fact that the true causes of
many neurological diseases are largely unknown. The relationship between
vaccinations and the onset of serious neuropsychiatric diseases is certainly
one of coincidence rather than causality. This claim results from controlled
studies that have excluded the association between vaccines and severe
neurological diseases, therefore it can be said, with little risk of error,
that the association between modern vaccinations and serious neurological
disorders is a true urban myth.”
Placebo, Ego and Defensiveness
Alternative
medicine practitioners enjoy playing mind games with their unsuspecting
patients. They understand fully the power of the placebo effect but that is
just the starting point. Everyone has an ego. No one likes to admit they made a
mistake. These practitioners know once the patient is in the door, it is the
patient who will be doing all the work.
Academic clinical neurologist at the
Yale University School of Medicine Steven Novella, MD has seen this time and
again:
“When people
try an unconventional treatment, perhaps out of desperation or just the hope
for relief, they may feel vulnerable to criticism or a bit defensive for trying
something unorthodox and even a bit bizarre. There is therefore a huge
incentive to justify their decision by concluding that the treatment worked –
to show all the skeptics that they were right all along.
“Then, mixed in with all of this, is a genuine improvement in mood, and
therefore symptoms, from the positive attention of the practitioner (if there
is one – i.e. you’re not taking an over-the-counter remedy), or just from the
hope that relief is on the way and the feeling that you are doing something
about your health and your symptoms. This is a genuine, but non-specific,
psychological effect of receiving treatment and taking steps to have some
control over your situation.”
Related
Posts
How To Avoid
Bad Medical Advice: A Basic Guideline http://www.mybestbuddymedia.com/2016/05/how-to-avoid-bad-medical-advice-basic.html
7 Ways
Health Gurus Dupe The Public http://www.mybestbuddymedia.com/2017/03/7-ways-health-gurus-dupe-public.html
30 Prying
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Well-Meaning
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13 Concise
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Dr. Oz and
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9 Devious
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Photo: https://jewel92.com/wp-content/uploads/Rubber_Duck_8374802487.jpg
Jerry De Luca is a Christian freelance writer who loves perusing dozens of interesting and informative publications. When he finds any useful info he summarizes it, taking the main points, and creates a (hopefully) helpful blog post.
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