A sampling of offerings from these woovets:
Medical Ozone & UV Light Therapies
Acupuncture
Homeopathy/Homotoxicology
Spinal Manipulative Therapy
Laser Therapy
Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine
Neoplastic Index Cancer Panel
Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy
Alpha-Stim Therapy
They do offer coffee, tea (holistic varieties only, I’m sure) and cookies to their “clients”, but I’m unsure if that refers to owners or their beasts.
Going back to “why high-end audio?” we also have the fact that for some reason (envy perhaps) our individual level of contempt for woo seems to be related to how expensive the woo is.
$6/lb Himalayan salt woo: Ho hum. Dumb woo.
$200 healing crystal woo: She’s a total ditzoid. Always has been; always will be.
$20,000 speaker cable woo: Holy shit Batman! That’s some kinda insanity right there. Alert the Internet! Hey y’all: let’s all laugh and point at this clueless dweeb with more money than brains!
For a non-audio guy like me, it was interesting to wind up a sales manager for pro audio equipment in Japan (Neumann, Lexicon, and Eventide were part of the line). It was actually easier to sell to professionals than the guys down in the consumer department because the pros only wanted to hear the device and would often do blind A-B testing to see if they liked it or not.
I couldn’t hear what they could, of course, but developed the art of listening intently with nod or two at random points. I did find out that even someone with zero musical ability and not a particularly good ear for pitch could develop a better sense with some exposure.
The consumer side was something else. All snake oil, smoke and mirrors.
Is this an example of very well done woo?
Did the Japanese customers, either pro or consumer, evidence any of the “imported is better” snobbery so common in the US for cars, wine, beer, etc.?
Given Japanese chauvinism and their large and until recently all-conquering consumer audio industry I’d have thought not. OTOH, human nature is universal and “imported => rare => special => insider knowledge => ain’t I cool!” is a pretty universal idea. As is the idea that, much like the US attitude to, say, cheese, they might choose to believe: “*We *make all the mass market high volume stuff and have the biggest industry, but they make the special small-batch artisan stuff that’s really, really good.”
This is an interesting one because it challenges one potential woo source (martial arts with a charismatic person as its brand) with another woo source (‘real fighting’ with marketing and hype behind it).
It is fallacious to call ‘full contact tournaments’ as some sort of vetting process when those tournaments are designed with rules and gear to protect their own participants from serious injury. UFC, for example, uses padded gloves, bans biting, throat strikes, groin, eye strikes, etc. You have to ‘submit’ someone rather than just cranking further to break that bone or joint. Jeet Kune Do, in contrast, teaches and relies on those techniques for its effectiveness.
A fellow student got jumped out in the normal non-ring world by 4 guys wanting to thrash him and rob him. He fought them off, hurting two of them rather badly and the other two ran away. This IMO vetted Jeet Kune Do more convincingly than any ring fight ever could.
Yes. You bet a 175 dollar meal can be way better than a 25 dollar one.
While eating at an expensive restaurant may not make financial sense, it isn’t woo. That is, no one goes to an expensive restaurant expecting to receive something that they don’t. (Barring outright fraudulent ingredients).
There are several factors that lead to higher costs in ‘fancy’ restaurants.
(1) Expensive ingredients: you could save money by just nom-nom-noming on a bucket of KFC, but for more expensive ingredients one needs to pay more. The fact that steak costs more than chicken does not make steak woo.
(2) Service: perhaps one doesn’t need to have their napkin replaced simply because they got up to go to the bathroom (or have a cloth napkin at all!), but that is part of the experience. It may not be of a great dollar value, but it isn’t woo. Those servers really are there, and they really are serving you.
(3) Labor: along with those expensive ingredients, there was a lot of labor (and time) in making that sauce and putting it all together.
(4) Dining room: you are essentially renting space, and expensive restaurants have a lower density of guests in the dining room. Nicer stuff too.
Yeah, that bucket of chicken can be pretty darn tasty too, but that isn’t the point.
What other fields besides high-end audio are susceptible to ‘woo’?
I have to say Marijuana.
Those of you who live in states that have recently legalized pot completely, or just allowed medical marijuana probably know what I am talking about. The stuff will cure cancer and just about everything else ailing you. You can make your clothes out of it, roof your house, pave your driveway, give your dogs coat a healthy sheen, regrow arms and legs, and make you realize once again that you DO love donuts.
There is a gap between the new industry and the regulation part of these food stuffs and pseudo medications. It is the Wild, Wild, West of snake oil out there until some kind of monitoring is in place. Although the FDA is starting to tell providers that you can’t say it cures cancer. Now, if you are sick you generally feel bad. If you get high you probably feel a bit better. And there are some apparent applications of CBD that help with aches and pains and in my opinion that option should be available to ease your discomfort or suffering.
But come on! It is likely to be beneficial to some people for some applications. The rest is just the “makes you feel better” part. Which is enough for me.
I have been a recreational pot smoker for 40 years and I don’t have cancer yet, don’t even get sick, never spent a night in the hospital, no broken bones, happily married, own my own home, maybe it is coincidental or maybe it is not.
Do you want to take that chance? 
Just like every other restaurant regardless of the price point, these cost drivers apply to all. But you forgot the one thing that makes mundane restaurant operational expenses higher in the places you are trying to justify: snobbery. Many lower-tier eateries have surprisingly good fare while some very expensive joints aren’t really worth it. You can believe the latter have some woo going for them.
Nobody should be saying anything about that until they’ve done the research. You know - like the scientific medical clinical trials and so forth that goes along with FDA approval enabling Big Pharma to peddle their poison.
Tell you what, though, when I was a teenager, Pharma (probably not quite so big) was greatly restrained from the peddling. There was some kind of ethos about who could advertise. There was that thing where tobacco was shoved off the air, but then, some time in the '80s, I think it was, we started seeing ads for Dewey, Cheetham & Howe, and then things like lipo and lasik, then Nerblagadol and Sutriffidan and so forth.
Technically, those ads are not woo, as such, but there is so much hucksterism going on, the practical difference is vanishing.
Well, a handcycle is probably a bit of a different case. I dabble in XC mountain biking, and dirt isn’t something that can be avoided, so that’s why I was speculating that just doing frequent chain cleanings followed up by inexpensive lubrication might be the “best” in the sense of good at reducing wear, and not costing an arm and a leg.
Actually, my handcycle uses standard mountain bike Shimano Ultegra(circa 2004-2005) components.
I use White Lightning Clean Ride. It’s not a weird hyper-expensive treatment, just an ordinary OTC lube. Goes on wet and when it dries, it leaves a waxy coating.
I can’t vouch for extended life over wet lubes but I’ve never needed to clean gunk from the chain, cassette/chainrings or the derailleur.
Ultegra is a road group. Stop spreading the woo!!!
It’s three chainrings/9-speed cassette and a long cage derailleur… I figured that was a mtn.bike version. Maybe it’s a touring version.
I don’t actually care all that much about the various group levels but that was the only group the bike was offered with.
ETA: Just went out to check, it’s all marked Ultegra.
Swimming pool care. Walk into almost any pool store, especially the well known national chains, and you’ll walk out with 100s of dollars in unnecessary chemicals.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Most of the social psychology “theory of everything” studies that you frequently see discussed here as if they were the gospel truth have turned out to be complete nonsense. The Implicit Association Test has been debunked, “Stereotype Threat” doesn’t seem to be replicating well at all, the notion that the legalization of abortion in the US caused the crime wave to recede has been debunked, and “Power Posing” has been shown to be completely bogus.
I have my doubts about the lead/crime theory as well but so far that one hasn’t been debunked.
If I could draw a graph, I’d show a “diminishing returns” graph for restaurant prices.
A place that’s $175 a pop absolutely is going to be better than a place that’s $25 a pop unless you are very unlucky, but I am not totally convinced it’ll be better than a place that’s $75 a person. I have examples a of a $150/person restaurant and a $75/person restaurant within walking distance of my house, and the $75/person place is as good as the $150/person place. However, no $25/person place compares with either.
But you can go way beyond $175. Celebrity chef restaurants can run you a tab of $750 and up for a couple - and there is simply no chance at all their food will consistently win a blind taste test with my favourite $75/person place.
You know those Iron Chef shows, where some shlub went up against a celebrity chef and almost always lost? I am 100% convinced that had the judges been forced to judge blind - not knowing who cooked what - the winning percentage of the celebrity chefs would have been 50-50.
Me too and have been since 1986 and my first MTB, an 85 Bianchi Grizzly. I’ve tried a bunch of different lubes (Teflon, White Lightning,WD-40, machine oil, Tri-Flow,etc…) over the years and what I’ve found works is the following:
At the beginning of the riding season I remove the chain, clean it (and all the pointy running bits) with a heavy duty degreaser, thoroughly dry them, dip the chain in liquefied paraffin wax, let it warm up and remove it and hang to dry. A very light coating of Boeshield T-9 spray on the cassette and front chain rings, and re-assemble. After a particularly mucky ride I’ll rinse off the driveline with a low pressure garden hose and a scrub brush, let dry and a quick spray. Since it dries, it doesn’t attract dirt.
The study with the dry chain doesn’t surprise me at all, as the main reason for the lube on a chain at all is primarily corrosion protection.
Cycling is rife with woo and I’m ashamed that for a very long time I lusted after many shiny, unobtanium parts that would make me the next Ned Overend. My biking buddy pointed out that if I lost 25 lbs it would be the same as riding a zero mass bike. If I could have caught him I would have killed him…
Even if he was /is right. Roadies are even worse that the MTB crowd, though. Without that $10000 Colnago frame you just won’t be allowed in the peloton for the weekend ride…
Is Ultegra still a road group if it’s on a cyclocross bike? 
Probably old news to most people, but all fields of medicine, including cardiac surgery, are susceptible to woo. It turns out ineffective surgery is still a veryy powerful placebo.
