Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Alternative Health and Loved Ones

Hey, what do you guys do when someone you love gets suckered into an alternative health treatment, one that claims fabulous health gains and scientific validity, but lacks even the tiniest scrape of actual scientific backing (and in fact, makes up shit to sell the scam)? It's not like this person is substituting necessary medical treatment for snake oil, and it's otherwise harmless; but this particular alternate health scam/treatement is utter nonsense; complete balderdash; and total flumberdoodle. And say this person starts pushing this BS on you, and say it's your mom, and now there's this fucking machine in your parents' house and everyone's fawning over it and blaming every symptom, both good and bad on it, and you just want to be left alone, but you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or be a know-it-all jackass; and maybe you should have an opener mind?

I'm asking for a friend.

9 comments:

Galspanic said...

If it doesn't make you feel good within a week, throw it on the side of the road to wellness.

riye said...

We had a little of that with my mom when she first got diagnosed with cancer. She didn't actually buy any snake oil or snake oil contraptions but her batty old Japanese lady friends had all kinds of crazy suggestions. I thought mom was being a naive idiot and she thought I was being a bitch. If your friend's mom is anything like mine I say let her do her thing as long as its not harming her--but keep close tabs on it. My fallback comment whenever mom has some fresh quackery to tell me about is "It doesn't work. If it worked nobody would get sick and no one would ever die."

FAKA! said...

Hee Haw!!! Thats the sound of the know-it-all jackass I would probably be =/ I guess it depends on how tough the battle would be.

bekah said...

If she thinks it's working then just let her do it since they say that a lot of the ability to heal is linked to your mind. But if after a while there is no change I support thowing it on the side of the road as Gals suggested.

kamapuaa said...

Recent studies have shown that the placebo effect is actually an extremely effective treatment in some cases.

I have to know though, what "alternative treatment" is this?

Lungclops said...

If the machine in question is a Tesla Coil Pyramid Charger, I can speak from experience when I say that your mother's health will improve holistically and syntergenically.

Mr. Pony said...

Hey, first off, thanks for all the frank and helpful thoughts. My friend really appreciates it.

He's just very glad that it's all so benign. No one's sick, and the alternative health scam is so ineffectual as to also be more or less harmless. If someone were sick, and the BS health treatment were taking the place of actual medical care, the story would be different, and there would be some real know-it-all jackassery bandied about, to the point that it was effective, at least.

The problem with leaving an ineffective alternative treatment (or any treatment, maybe) behind is the very reason it might be okay in the first place: the placebo effect. If something seems to be ever so slightly effective, you hang onto it. Especially if you bought an expensive machine to make your alkaline water.

It sounded like garbage to me. Aibu9 and Fugu pointed out that there's fucking hydrochloric acid in your stomach. Ionized water with a pH of 7.8 isn't going to do a whole hell of a lot. I looked it up and found this ugly but informative page.

Maybe I'm all up in arms because it's been a great couple of weeks for science. With the revelation that yes, you should vaccinate your kids, stupid, as well as the smirking recalculation of everyone's astrological sign. Well, I was smirking, anyway. I should probably just embrace that know-it-all-jackass thing. Or my friend should.

Fugu said...

Has your friend ever won an argument against his mom? Just curious.

Also: CAPTCHA for the day: sucksP

Mr. Pony said...

Let me ask.