Paul Offit,
M.D. wrote a fascinating book, Do You Believe in Magic?, about the
alternative medicine industry and the many snake oil salesmen that participate
in it. I find it incredible that people
will buy alternative medicine cures even when they are proven to have no
value. The old adage that ‘There’s a
sucker in every crowd’ seems to have become ‘Every crowd consists of
suckers’.
Everyone
wants an ‘Easy Button’. They want to
lose weight by taking a pill or have their stomach stapled. People want to be healthy and live
forever. There’s a juice drink for
that. There is a cure for cancer hidden
in the special vitamins made of ‘ancient herbs’. We are told that the ancients all had
incredible secrets to long life. Strangely,
their lives weren’t any longer than ours are today. They weren’t a whole lot shorter, either, so
it’s anyone’s guess as to whether Ancient Medicine had anything to do with
current lifespans.
Oh, as an
aside, the reason that average life expectancies were, in fact, much lower in
ancient times had to do with the high infant and early mortality rates from
disease, lack of sanitary conditions, lack of adequate, yes we shall mention
it, medical procedures. The same is true
today in, say, Swaziland and Sierra Leone where poverty and very high infant
mortality due to poor medical services affect overall life expectancy.
Dr. Offit proposed
that once ‘alternative’ medicine becomes scientifically proven to work, through
valid procedures and experimentation, it becomes part of the ‘modern’ medicine
world. Any sort of anecdotal proof, no
matter how loudly claimed, will never be enough to force a product to work.
Recently a
friend and supplier sent me a note with an email blast advertisement
attached. She thought that I would find
it interesting. The customer claimed to
take the guesswork out of calculating embroidery costs by producing a table
with a standard price for ‘up to 10,000 stitches’. My first reaction was to panic because I saw
that their prices seem lower than ours.
Then I looked at all the detailed promises that they made regarding
timely delivery, free freight and so forth.
In my
experience, the louder one shouts about superior and/or free service, the less
attention I should give to their claims.
If a vendor claims to be ‘World’s Greatest Innovator’ I probably will
look elsewhere for innovation. If they
have to tell me that they give fabulous service, I’ll look for it and be
hypercritical if they fail in any small way.
If they have to sport their prices in a big way and tell me that they
are low, I’m going to look for the sneaky add-ons because I know where their
real costs have to be. “Oh, you wanted
real thread on that logo? We charge extra
for that. Otherwise, you get our
patented invisible logo thread.”
I don’t know
if the advertising is working for my competitor. People are definitely accustomed to hearing
claims to service and quality and we are not at all immune to unsubstantiated
representations of the magic pill. After
all, four out of five dentists [to whom we gave an entire case of the stuff]
recommend beet-juice for brushing. And
things really do go better with fishnet stockings. Or something like that. It’s all in the catchy rhythm.
Anecdotal
evidence is what advertising is all about.
Even before reading Dr. Offit’s book, I was skeptical. Now at least I have a reference point from
which to direct my questioning eye.
On the other
hand, maybe there is a real magic pill.
I think it’s time to go hunting for one.
