On alternative medicine

I liked this article about how research refutes the claims of various alternative medicines. It really bothers me how pharmaceutical companies get cast as villains while people will go ahead and trust alternative treatments without any kind of reliable scientific testing. I'm reminded of this Onion article, "Revolutionary New Insoles Combine Five Forms of Pseudoscience."

Have you seen this supposed health supplement "Airborne" that comes in a friendly, cartoon-covered box with the reassuring words, "Created by a School Teacher?" First off, why should I expect a schoolteacher to be an expert on health supplements? Shouldn't "Created by a Pharmaceutical Researcher" carry more weight? Obviously teachers come into contact with a lot of germs from students, but I would imagine one would build up some immunity after a while anyway.

The directions for this thing seem like a scam, too. How often do they recommend you take it? "Take Airborne a day or two before entering crowded places like airplanes, movie theaters or offices." "Many people do take one Airborne as a daily dietary supplement." Judging from their online pricing, that would come to about $300 a year. But how many times every year do you enter a crowded place and not get sick? I'm in an office nearly every day, and I caught a cold only once over the past year. That's not very much to begin with. But for eleven and a half months, my "do nothing" approach worked. If I were inclined to believe in Airborne and had been taking it, it might have sounded impressive to some if I were to go around saying I had taken it every day for nearly a year and hadn't gotten sick. Even including the last two weeks, where I did get sick, I imagine "I took Airborne every day for a year and only got sick once" could sell it for some people. That's how anecdotal evidence works. Most of the time, sure, you'll take it and not get sick. But that's because you usually won't get sick anyway.

If they were really interested in producing a product with verifiable results, they'd do scientific tests and actually come up with real evidence, not just anecdotes. If they're so confident their product works, why not test it so that they'll know for sure? Because it's a lot easier to cook something up in your kitchen and sell it with advertising, friendly cartoons, and gullibility, that's why.

Update: I knew I'd seen the cartoonists' work before; it's Lloyd Dangle, creator of the Troubletown strip found in alt-weekly newspapers. Dangle's got a blog entry comparing his work with the knockoffs on the boxes of drugstore generic brands. Of course, it's standard practice for the generic brands to copy the look and feel of the name brand, but it's pretty funny comparing Dangle's masterwork of commercial art with the cheap knockoffs (which, I'm sure, work just as well or as poorly as the original).