Quackery
This year, we Americans will spend billions of dollars on products that do nothing for us - or may even harm us. And we'll do it for the same reason people have done it since ancient times... We want to believe in miracles. We want to find simple solutions and shortcuts to better health. It's hard to resist. All of us, at one time or another, have seen or heard about a product - a new and exotic pill, a device, or potion - that can easily solve our most vexing problem.
With this product, we're told, we can eat all we want and still lose weight. We can grow taller or have bigger breasts. Or we can overcome baldness, age, arthritis, even cancer. It sounds too good to be true - and it is. But we're tempted to try the product in spite of all we know about modern medical science
- or perhaps because of it. After all, many treatments we take for granted today were once considered miracles. How can we tell the difference?
Not all advertisements for health products are false, of course. In fact, the vast majority aren't .So just what is quackery? Simply put, quackery is the promotion of a medical remedy that doesn't work or hasn't been proven to work.
In modern times, quackery is known as health fraud. But call it quackery or call it health fraud, the result is the same - unfulfilled wishes, wasted dollars, endangered health. Often quack products are fairly easy to spot, like the magic pills you are supposed to take to stay forever young. But sometimes the products are vaguely based on some medical report that you may even have heard about in the news. In general, when looking over ads for medicines and medical devices, watch out for those that seem to promise too much too easily. Quack cures rob us of more than money. They can steal health away or even take lives. Quacks may lure the seriously and often desperately ill, such as people suffering from arthritis and cancer, into buying a bogus cure. When people try quack remedies instead of getting effective medical help, their illnesses progress, sometimes beyond the treatable stage.
Quacks have always been quick to exploit current thinking. The snake-oil salesmen a few generations back carried an array of "natural" remedies to sell to a public that was still close to the frontier. And today, quacks take advantage of the back-to-nature movement, capitalizing on the notion that there ought to be simple, natural solutions to almost any problem.
The woman who sprained her ankle mentioned that after seven weeks she felt a major decrease in pain and could walk normally once again, but the MagnaSoles inserts had only been released for one week. It continues with more scientific jargon and goes on to talk about the “healing power of crystals to re-stimulate dead foot cells with vibrational biofeedback… a process similar to that by which medicine makes people better.” the logic in this statement can easily be proven wrong because dead cells cannot be brought back to life, and crystals aren’t a real form of medicine. These two examples comes to show how inadequate and naive customers actually are, they’re baited with false information and advertisement, but because scientists are quoted, and scientific literature is being used, they aren’t
As of now, many of the sicknesses are completely prevented and controlled. People of today have the conveniency to run to the store or their cabinet, eat a pill, and feel better in a short notice. Most of the time, it goes unnoticed for one to wonder how they would cope with their throbbing h...
New Product Our product was born out of a need and from the experience of Chris Parise.
The author writes with diction composed of scientific jargon that is never explained as well as quotes from seemingly “credible” people, but again, these unknown people are never explored in detail. For example, the product is supposed to “convert pain-nuclei into pleasing comfortrons” while increasing the effectiveness by matching “the Earth’s natural vibration rate of 32.805 kilofrankels.” The scientific-sounding words, comfortrons and kilofrankels, give the appearance of credibility because they sound true to someone uneducated in science, but in reality, they are completely fictitious. Also, people like “Dr. Wayne Frankel, the California State University biotrician...” and “Dr. Arthur Bluni, the pseudoscientist…” are quoted, but they have no well-known significance. Scientific jargon and quoted “scientists” are expamples of false science and authority used in advertisements to scam customers into thinking the product is credible. People have become oblivious to these things and take so many things as fact just because they sound true even though they are actually
"In the past two decades or so, health care has been commercialized as never before, and professionalism in medicine seems to be giving way to entrepreneurialism," commented Arnold S. Relman, professor of medicine and social medicine at Harvard Medical School (Wekesser 66). This statement may have a great deal of bearing on reality. The tangled knot of insurers, physicians, drug companies, and hospitals that we call our health system are not as unselfish and focused on the patients' needs as people would like to think. Pharmaceutical companies are particularly ruthless, many of them spending millions of dollars per year to convince doctors to prescribe their drugs and to convince consumers that their specific brand of drug is needed in order to cure their ailments. For instance, they may present symptoms that are perfectly harmless, and lead potential citizens to believe that, because of these symptoms, they are "sick" and in need of medication. In some instances, the pharmaceutical industry in the United States misleads both the public and medical professionals by participating in acts of both deceptive marketing practices and bribery, and therefore does not act within the best interests of the consumers.
of our happiness, and Lasn feels that plentitude is our problem. We have the ability
In the business of drug production over the years, there have been astronomical gains in the technology of pharmaceutical drugs. More and more drugs are being made for diseases and viruses each day, and there are many more drugs still undergoing research and testing. These "miracle" drugs are expensive, however, and many Americans cannot afford these prices.
generations to become healthier, and it could be more affordable, it will be cheaper to cure a
One such misleading advertisement was for a product called Skinny Pill for Kids. This diet pill was targeting kids ranging from age 6 to 12. The pill was supposed to help kids lose weight and provide essential daily vitamins, minerals and herbs. “The marketer of the supplement said her company had not done safety tests on children” (CNN, 2002). It turned out that the product being advertised as a “miracle” to help children loose weight contained herbs that are diuretics. “Uva ursi, juniper berry, and buchu leaf all cause the body to lose water. A doctors’ guide to drugs and alternative remedies, states the uva ursi should not be given to children under age 12” (CNN, 2002).
In conclusion, all three of these practices offer the opportunity for great medical advancement but struggle with ethical issues and possible risks as well as questions of their viablity as legitimate treatments to benefit medical problems.
Gatty.B (2010). Fighting Fraud US Government cracking down on those who commit healthcare scams “Dermatology Times,” 31 (11)12.Health Source-Consumer Edition
According to recent statistics, every year Americans spend about $50 billion on products and services promoted to help them lose weight. Many of the overweight and obese people that join commercial weight loss programs are looking for a quick fix to lose the weight, such as fad diets and dietary supplements that are marketed to burn fat fast. However, many of these diets offer little success or success for a short time, resulting in many gaining the weight back a short time afterwards. Fad diets are “a trendy practice that has widespread appeal among a population. After a period, however, people lose interest in the practice, and it becomes no longer fashionable. People often lose weight while following fad diets, but usually regain much of
Most fad diets do not focus on meeting the nutritional requirements of your body, but on losing weight quickly. This encourages unhealthy eating habits as many people result to restricting their intake of foods that have essential nutrients. In fact, the diet programs are designed to take advantage of the willingness of people to attempt anything to lose weight or feel and look
In recent years, the exposure of pill-peddling pharmaceutical companies and the dangers- such as the various toxins and the risk of dependence- that their manufactured drugs pose on the body has turned more and more people of the western world back to basics for their health care. Richard L. Nahin from the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine states that according to the institute’s latest research, "It's clear that millions of Americans every year are turning to complementary and alternative medicine."