Getting Smart About Your Health

A recent edition of the Consumer Health Digest in my email was a real eye-opener! It illustrated the primary reason for the need for consumer protection: many Americans are not using the slightest bit of critical thinking or scientific understanding when dealing with personal health issues. They are looking for magic answers and falling for the most outlandish promises with paper-thin backing.

The first article was about a New York University Psychology Department review looking for what they called “drift” from the core mission of social work. It asked: “Should social workers be engaged in these practices?” By systematically searching the Internet for practitioner websites, they identified many offerings that “fall beyond those fuzzy borders” of the defined mission and in fact, “might appear highly questionable.”

Looking at the accompanying table, there is no “might” about it. The long list includes such services as: a course in miracles, angel card reading, Aura-Soma®: Color and Aromas, Auricular Detox, Awakening Your Light Body and Radiance, Biofield Tuning, Certified Cuddle Party Facilitator and Certified Intuitive Healer. And those just brush the surface at the beginning of the alphabet!

These and many others on the list have the distinct color and aroma of pseudoscience, superstition and scams using mysterious-sounding methods to lure in customers. It leads to calls for a “concerted national effort to stamp out pseudoscience in all of healthcare.” But people are wasting their time and money of their own free will. We don’t need a national effort; we need a critical thinking population, because it doesn’t stop there.

Next I read about a former massage therapist explaining, “Why I quit my massage therapy career.” The author tells about disputes with his regulatory body and the hate mail from colleagues as he tried, through his writing, to call attention to all the unproven therapies passed off in that field of practice. He concludes, “Massage therapy has a deeply pseudoscientific character overall, defining itself mostly in opposition to science-based or 'mainstream' health care, where rejection of science is actually celebrated by many practitioners, probably a majority."

Again, the problem is not all the false cures, but that so many people fall for these deceptive practices with the hope that they have found the easy and magical way out of their various health problems.

Finally, in that same newsletter from that week: “The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that – as a result of a settlement – [the company] is mailing 227,995 refund checks totaling more than $6 million and averaging $26.57 to consumers who purchased health products from three individuals and the 19 companies they controlled—collectively known as Tarr, Inc.” Refunds included products for weight loss, muscle building and wrinkle-reduction. The company was accused of marketing their products with “unsupported claims, fake magazine and news sites, bogus celebrity endorsements, phony consumer testimonials, deceptive offers of 'free' and 'risk-free' trials, and enrollments of people without their consent in programs that charged them for additional products each month.”

But for every one the FTC catches, how many others slide by with similar schemes using endorsements in place of evidence, self-conducted so-called clinical trials, weasel words like “results may vary,” and the usual other tricks I warn of frequently? The only way to avoid these traps is to wise up, be skeptical and use critical thinking.

As an added note, not all the people that promote such treatments are charlatans. As I was training as a yoga teacher, I ran into a fair number of serious, devoted practitioners. They have a selective acceptance of science, where they want to pick and choose what to ignore and what counts as medicine, therapy and healthy practices depending on how their aura or chakras are aligned. Arguing the facts isn’t worth the time. (I’m sure many a shaman was equally sincere as he hurled virgins into the volcano.)