Except for medicine, there is no greater target market for alternative hucksters than cosmetics. A dozen non-profits have appeared claiming that chemicals are harming women, without disclosing that the levels of chemicals that can be considered harmful are in defiance of what Paracelsus noted about the dose making a chemical a poison versus a benefit. They are at trace levels, you have to believe in homeopathy, or its 1990s re-brand as endocrine disruption, to believe it is magically bio-accumulating you and harming you while cancer rates continue to go down.
Congressional documents show Juul Labs met with eight Native American tribes about its vaping device. Native Americans still have the highest smoking levels in America, 22 percent versus 14 percent overall, so if this was 2015 I'd argue 'of course they should talk to tribes, everyone who smokes should be approached with smoking cessation and harm reduction tools' but the evidence is clear that Juul was not just appealing to smokers, they were creating new markets. And people who see racial profiling, legitimately or as an overarching conspiracy, will say they targeted vulnerable communities.
One medical professional who sounded the alarm about China's coronavirus epidemic was not an academic or an immunologist, Li Wenliang was an ophthalmologist.In December, he worried in a medical chat group that people with a SARS-like illness were being quarantined in his hospital in Wuhan and the communist dictatorship arrested him for "rumor-mongering." “We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice—is that understood?”
Measles has broken out on the California coast again, as it has done ever since discredited former doctor Andrew Wakefield tried to sell a new vaccine by claiming the existing ones causes autism.When Science 2.0 was in its early days, anti-vaccine sentiment was a tiny fringe of religious people in one group and then a whole swath of people on the west coast in another. If you wanted to find a hotbed of anti-science sentiment, including beliefs about vaccines and organic food, you could take a compass and draw a circle around a Whole Foods.
Michael Pollan, the darling of the anti-science community, believes his walled Berkeley garden is a model for those dumb farmers who do it for a living and that Medicine Is A Vast Corporate Conspiracy.He's like Paul Krugman when it comes to economics. Basically, he's like a Kardashian or anyone else famous for being famous, with no one really able to figure out why.
Denby Royal felt like being a holistic nutritionist, selling alternative health treatments and products, was a legitimate choice. Royal believed in the products and "certification" in Canada (and the U.S.) is kind of a joke but people will rationalize it as reasonable either way. You can be a trainer in a gym or a hair stylist with just as much training - and no disrespect to either of those, but they are not qualified to give medical advice either.You learn early that you cant say “treat," "cure," "heal" or "prevent” while suggesting that alternatives to medicine and cosmic diet advice do just that.
I don't know when soup stock became bone broth but it taught me that the best way to sell something you have just laying around is to re-brand it something exotic. No one wants all that coriander you grow in your back yard? Call it cilantro and suddenly it's an expensive Whole Foods herb. The type of people who shop at Whole Foods or who take food advice from celebrities are asking to be exploited, so you might as well make money.I don't know if Kylie Jenner has a soup line coming out or not, but since everything that family touches turns to gold, Campbell's Soup is crazy if they don't create a subsidiary and put her name on it. She says she drinks two jars of it a day.
A giant swath of Americans who don't accept real medicine will somehow accept Asian folk medical claims. When Asians aren't eating shark fins, they are using them as unsubstantiated remedies, and either or both are what was the likely outcome for shark fins from Africa destined for Asia that were confiscated in Miami.
Golden Rice, which was created by independent academics to produce higher beta-carotene, which means it will produce vitamin A and prevent blindness, is approved in places like the US and Canada, but let's be honest - we are rich nations. We don't need it. Other countries certainly do. Vitamin A deficiency kills 2,000,000 kids each year, and causes blindness in just as many. Why would Greenpeace oppose saving millions of kids in developing countries? Why don't they love children more than they hate science?
Some in the pro-science community are a little outraged that the New York Times ran an article in which the two authors wrapped Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop company in the flag of feminism' claiming evidence-based medicine is how the patriarchy keeps women down and Goop selling nonsense alternatives to medicine are as empowering as Shakira and Jennifer Lopez gyrating at the Super Bowl for free somehow is.
