With all due respect, I disagree. I am the OP and I never intended this thread to become a debate on whether scam/snake oil and/or homeopathic “remedies” actually “work”. The pills are a confirmed scam, as a recent class-action suit that won 23 million dollars against Airborne proved. Here is just one cite: Airborne Settles Suit over False Claims : NPR
My factual question is this: It’s no surprise that “Airborne” and similar scam “remedies” are big sellers amongst people with low intelligence and/or poor reasoning skills. It’s always been that way, that scams target stupid people. But how is it that **intelligent **people fall for it?
I do think this is a valid question for GQ, and is not a debate nor a case of IMHO.
The three favorite words of alternative medicine advertising are “promotes”, “supports”, and “boosts”. They are vague, indefinable, fake qualities that sound like they mean something, but don’t. I’ve yet to see an advertisement for any that doesn’t include at least one of them. But the words make you feel like they’ve got your back. Actually, I can’t figure out why intelligent people take them, either. We’re bigger suckers for advertising than we like to think, I guess. Just like how I just got up and took a vitamin after reading this whole thread, just in case my health needs supporting, boosting, and promoting.
There’s nothing wrong with Airborne. But it’s not a magic immune-booster, it’s an overpriced vitamin pill. The vitamins in it are good at boosting your immune system a little. It’s mostly a Vitamin C pill. Some of their advertising is misleading, though, and I know that some people do think of Airborne in a less-than-logical way.
EDIT: By the way, the “Homeopathy” page on Wikipedia is hysterical, from a certain point of view. The phrase “its use of remedies lacking active ingredients have caused homeopathy to be described as pseudoscience or quackery.” is followed by no less than five citations. This is someone’s pet peeve.
But why do you prefer things in the natural environment? The example of lead and arsenic shows that being in the natural environment does not mean it’s harmless. The example of homeopathy shows that being natural does not make it efficacious. Personally, I use what works best and don’t worry about whether it is natural, especially since that is such a vague term. If I synthesize the active chemical in willow bark to make aspirin is that natural or not? Would you prefer to make willow bark tea and not know what the exact dosage is?
II’m strictly in the Western medicine and science camp, but I found that if I feel a cold coming on, and I take very large doses of vitamin C, either that feeling fades away quickly, or the cold that does strike is shorter and less severe. When I get a cold, it lasts for a week to a week and a half. Megadosing vitamin C, and it’s down to a few days at the most.
Now, once a cold has struck, if I didn’t megadose before, taking vitamin C really doesn’t seem to help much.
Aspirin is essentially just willow bark extract minus the diarrhea. Does synthesizing something found in nature to remove the negative effects somehow make it bad?
My mom “got me into” it before I really understood what it was.
Now I keep at it because:
I get colds relatively infrequently;
It seems to work for me well enough (or I make it work well enough);
I take it less often than the package suggests;
So it’s a bargain for the effect it has on me. Sure, I could eat or drink something cheaper, but I have leftover tablets that are not past expiration, and I don’t know if anything else will make me feel better (which is all that really matters), so I figure, why not?
I have a question - and I realize you’re kind of getting a barrage here, so I apologize for adding to it, but it’s a genuine question and one to which I have often tried to get an answer from folks who feel as you feel:
What is your working definition of the word “natural” as you’re using it here?
Some seemingly intelligent people labor under this misapprehension, which is popular among alt med devotees.
It is of course true that under some circumstances, a medication’s effectiveness can vary based on genetic factors. It does not mean, as some like to think, that any drug you take is basically a crapshoot, or that a drug that has no logical/proven scientific basis is worth trying on the theory that you might be one of the lucky ones for whom it’s a godsend.
The concept that people are so “highly individualized” that all therapy must be individually tailored for them works nicely for scamsters, but is a gross exaggeration of the degree of variation in human physiology.
As to why people are attracted to a drug or treatment because it was devised by a schoolteacher, or a mom, or Fred down at the sewage plant - this marketing ploy appeals to people who resent professionals and believe that cheap, safe, wildly effective cures are being suppressed by those who Don’t Want You To Know about them. You don’t have to be a moron to buy into this mindset.
For those of you who take Airborne for the vitamin C, I’d like to point you to drugstore.com. There, you can buy 10 Airborne tablets (with 1000 mg vitamin C) for 6.19 (about .62/tablet). Alternatively, you could buy 180 GNC brand Vitamin C pills (1000 mg) for 12.99 (.07/pill).
I suppose natural to me is something found in nature that isn’t synthesized or played with.
That said, I am a hypocrite, because I do eat GM food sometimes.
Just to reiterate, I do use pharmaceuticals too, I just try out a natural remedy before I resort to the OTC drugs. I’m not a hippy granola or anything here, I just don’t want to pop an OTC pill for everything that ails me.
The same reason they buy diet pills and fall for phishing scams. Desperation (and, in the case of scams, usually greed). Hey… it might work, right? This might be the magic pill that helps me lose 20 pounds or fight off that cold before my big meeting. Smart people do stupid things all the time.