How Quackery Sells
Taken from Quackwatch.org
Modern health quacks are supersalesmen. They play on fear. They cater to hope. And once they have you, they’ll keep you coming back for more . . . and more . . . and more. Seldom do their victims realize how often or how skillfully they are cheated. What sells is not the quality of their products, but their ability to influence their audience.
Since ancient times, people have sought at least four different magic potions: the love potion, the fountain of youth, the cure-all, and the athletic superpill. Quackery has always been willing to cater to these desires ………. Most people who think they have been helped by an unorthodox method enjoy sharing their success stories with their friends. Rarely do they realize how difficult it is to evaluate a “health” product on the basis of personal experience.
Another slick way for quackery to attract customers is the invented disease. Virtually everyone has symptoms of one sort or another…….. Labeling these ups and downs of life as symptoms of disease enables the quack to provide “treatment.” Quacks also capitalize on the natural healing powers of the body by taking credit whenever possible for improvement in a patient’s condition.
The most important characteristic to which the success of quacks can be attributed is probably their ability to exude confidence……… because people like the idea of making choices, quacks often refer to their methods as “alternatives.” …….
The disclaimer is a related tactic. Instead of promising to cure your specific disease, some quacks will offer to “cleanse” or “detoxify” your body or do other things to “help the body to heal itself.” This type of disclaimer serves two purposes. Since it is impossible to measure the processes the quack describes, it is difficult to prove him wrong. In addition, if the quack is not a physician, the use of nonmedical terminology may help to avoid prosecution for practicing medicine without a license ……….. The “money-back guarantee” is a favorite trick of mail-order quacks. Most have no intention of returning any money—but even those who are willing know that few people will bother to return the product.
Organized quackery poses its opposition to medical science as a “philosophical conflict” or “paradigm shift,” rather than a clash between proven versus unproven or fraudulent methods……. Quacks like to charge that, “Science doesn’t have all the answers.” That’s true, but it doesn’t claim to have them. It is quackery that constantly claims to have answers for incurable diseases.
Each of these ploys represents a basic technique called misdirection — analogous to what magicians do to shift the audience’s attention away from what is important in order to deceive them. When faced with a criticism they cannot meet head on, quacks simply change the topic.
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