The More Things Change...

The old saying is true: the more things change, the more they remain the same.  But today we must be far more careful than ever when facing old-fashioned threats.

This thought came from a new book I picked up at the library.  It's called Quackery:  A brief history of the worst ways to cure everything.  It contains several short sections, each covering one of the weird and often painful or disgusting medical practices of the past.

On page 47 in the radium section, I was stunned by the familiarity of ideas.  “Despite the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, radium remained entirely unregulated because it was classified as a natural element.  (Many today still make the automatic assumption that a natural substance is always pure, useful and has no side effects.)  Because it was natural and unregulated guess what happened.  “Advertisements sprang up in newspapers touting the ability of this radioactive and sometimes deadly element as, for example, an aid to youth and beauty, health, and relief of aches and pains in joints and muscles.”

Radium is related to radon gas, and you can’t buy or sell a house without an inspection confirming safe levels, because it can cause lung cancer.  Radium in general is dangerous and anything but healthy, so this is an extreme example, but it did remind me of a couple of my comments posted at the beginning of this year about raw water, which can be dangerous, and hydrogenated water, which is expensive and backed by weak science.

 The following week I featured some of those miracle cures in newspapers that promise instant results and portray themselves as such a threat to Big Pharma that behind the scenes moves are supposedly afoot to banish them from the market.  (So you’d better act fast!)

And in December I wrote about the British National Health Service no longer paying for what they consider low value treatments including:  homeopathy and herbal medicines, fish oil, glucosamine and chondroitin combination products and lutein and antioxidant combination products.  The NHS reject these and some others as having low clinical effectiveness, with scant scientific backing while presenting significant safety concerns.

The next paragraph in the Quackery book tells how radium was so expensive that most of the so-called radioactive products “did not actually contain any radioactive ingredients at all.”  Instead of buying a dangerous product, they were buying a worthless product relying on placebo effect for its curative powers, a fact that doubtless saved lives but still emptied pocketbooks.  We see the same advertising schemes and mislabeling today.

These tactics of taking an unregulated substance and touting its supposed miraculous health benefits have been going on for years.  But the promotions today are even more insidious.  They go to the very edge of their legal boundaries, using scientific sounding words, enthusiastic endorsements and often trying to pass as news articles while burying required disclaimers at the end in small print.  The speed and breadth of communications in the modern world, as I explained last time, distributes misinformation quickly.  Particularly in the case of health issues, dangers are compounded by the fact that diseases and conditions may clear up on their own fooling users into attributing a cure to a worthless product.  That’s why listening to friends who swear by the effectiveness of this or that cure is so problematic.  Finally, as this Scientific American article on fake news points out, the more you hear an idea or opinion, the more familiar it becomes and the more you tend to believe it, even if you already know better.

Things stay the same, but in this modern age critical thinking, being skeptical and doing good research from reliable sources are much more urgently needed to protect your health and your wallet.