This is an important topic and example-in my Substack and published by Sensible Medicine, https://www.sensible-med.com/p/beyond-the-hype-why-good-theories, I explore this issue and created an equation: Cool mechanism/theory + compelling anecdote + credentialled expert does not equal credible evidence. Most all of the supplement industry follows this equation and so much else in the alternative medicine/wellness space.
Thank you for writing this. The pattern is painfully consistent: grief as credibility, “natural” as safety, citations as camouflage, testimonials galore, then in vitro data sold as human proof. Financial incentives also matter, because they are part of the mechanism. I also appreciated the clean line between “worth investigating” and “take eight pills a day and skip prescriptions.” Restacking this for readers who want receipts rather than miracles.
Another great article on a very important topic. Thank you.
Small editorial quibble: it's okay, especially in this instance to take the next step beyond "This is false" to "This is a lie". I know some people shy away from calling out lies explicitly because it sounds judgy and also implies certain knowledge of intent. But when the falsity is so readily demonstrable with publicly available information, AND the liar has such a clear incentive for promulgating the lie (cha-ching!), it's important to call a lie a lie. Even if the liar is repeating something they believe to be true, it's still a lie.
So it's gone from glugging gallons of aloe vera juice found in health food stores to wellness "influencers" pushing aloe vera supplements through MLM. Same ideology, different mode to deliver it. Unfortunately it now reaches a wider audience and can do more harm.
Should add another variable: "The company you keep." Consorting with Mandrola and Cifu on Sensible Medicine is grounds for vigorous skepticism and a questioning of ones commitment to science-based medicine.
This is what I always think of with supplements - if X supplement really worked so well, the pharmaceutical companies would be all over it. So as someone who does take a few different supplements, I sometimes wonder if any of them actually do anything.
Important topic. People facing serious illness are incredibly vulnerable, and the article does a good job recognizing the fear and hope involved — and why testimonials and personal stories can be so persuasive.
What struck me, though, is the rhetorical symmetry. The article critiques the familiar wellness swindler playbook — tragedy → miracle molecule → citation stacking → conspiracy → product sales — yet the response follows a recognizable debunk template of its own: identify the “misinformer,” expose financial incentives, dismantle the evidence, reaffirm institutional science. I wonder whether moving beyond these familiar templates might help the conversation — and consensus.
The harder question is one of tone. How do you acknowledge powerful personal stories without extinguishing hope or sounding condescending — and still reach the people who most need the information? That’s the real medical-writing challenge.
I imagine that you have done posts on the impossibility of scientific certainty --- what good science can do is eliminate uncertainty around a hypothesis, thus increasing the likelihood of certainty. It probably behoves repeating or at least providing a link to such a previous article. A tip-off to pseudoscience is thus the claim of certainty.
“Cancer reframed as a configuration-space exploit using the Pay-to-Persist framework. Cancer cells found a way to lower metabolic costs (S[γ]), degrade coherent identity (R[γ]), and optimize for cell-level rather than organism-level persistence. Treatment strategy: close the exploits through metabolic targeting, differentiation therapy, and microenvironment normalization rather than just killing cells. Includes novel combination therapies, testable predictions, and clinical classification by exploit profile. Released under CC BY-SA 4.0 with viral open science requirements: any clinical trials, drug development, or commercial applications must publish results openly and share protocols. Cancer treatment must remain a commons.”
I agree with everything here and agree that most if not all wellness influencers are whack - this is a genuine question for the researchers out there: People intutitively know that the elimination of certain things and/or the addition of certain supplements make them feel better and, realizing that correlation is not causation etc. etc., I think that this is often beyond what can be explained by a placebo effect. If the bottleneck is need for more human data, why not say...."no proof YET" or "early indicators suggest"....or other qualified statements? Do we know iit DOESN'T work? Has the null hypothesis been disproven?
This is an important topic and example-in my Substack and published by Sensible Medicine, https://www.sensible-med.com/p/beyond-the-hype-why-good-theories, I explore this issue and created an equation: Cool mechanism/theory + compelling anecdote + credentialled expert does not equal credible evidence. Most all of the supplement industry follows this equation and so much else in the alternative medicine/wellness space.
Thank you for writing this. The pattern is painfully consistent: grief as credibility, “natural” as safety, citations as camouflage, testimonials galore, then in vitro data sold as human proof. Financial incentives also matter, because they are part of the mechanism. I also appreciated the clean line between “worth investigating” and “take eight pills a day and skip prescriptions.” Restacking this for readers who want receipts rather than miracles.
You hit on one of the true difficulties in this conversation: the people hawking this stuff may actually believe what they are saying.
yes!
Another great article on a very important topic. Thank you.
Small editorial quibble: it's okay, especially in this instance to take the next step beyond "This is false" to "This is a lie". I know some people shy away from calling out lies explicitly because it sounds judgy and also implies certain knowledge of intent. But when the falsity is so readily demonstrable with publicly available information, AND the liar has such a clear incentive for promulgating the lie (cha-ching!), it's important to call a lie a lie. Even if the liar is repeating something they believe to be true, it's still a lie.
Again, keep up the great work!
So it's gone from glugging gallons of aloe vera juice found in health food stores to wellness "influencers" pushing aloe vera supplements through MLM. Same ideology, different mode to deliver it. Unfortunately it now reaches a wider audience and can do more harm.
“Increases immune activation by a factor of 10.” …umh… isn’t this dangerous for chemotherapy patients?
Should add another variable: "The company you keep." Consorting with Mandrola and Cifu on Sensible Medicine is grounds for vigorous skepticism and a questioning of ones commitment to science-based medicine.
Activating the immune system willy-nilly sounds like a terrible idea. Does this woman know how dangerous the immune system can be?
This is what I always think of with supplements - if X supplement really worked so well, the pharmaceutical companies would be all over it. So as someone who does take a few different supplements, I sometimes wonder if any of them actually do anything.
Important topic. People facing serious illness are incredibly vulnerable, and the article does a good job recognizing the fear and hope involved — and why testimonials and personal stories can be so persuasive.
What struck me, though, is the rhetorical symmetry. The article critiques the familiar wellness swindler playbook — tragedy → miracle molecule → citation stacking → conspiracy → product sales — yet the response follows a recognizable debunk template of its own: identify the “misinformer,” expose financial incentives, dismantle the evidence, reaffirm institutional science. I wonder whether moving beyond these familiar templates might help the conversation — and consensus.
The harder question is one of tone. How do you acknowledge powerful personal stories without extinguishing hope or sounding condescending — and still reach the people who most need the information? That’s the real medical-writing challenge.
I imagine that you have done posts on the impossibility of scientific certainty --- what good science can do is eliminate uncertainty around a hypothesis, thus increasing the likelihood of certainty. It probably behoves repeating or at least providing a link to such a previous article. A tip-off to pseudoscience is thus the claim of certainty.
“Cancer reframed as a configuration-space exploit using the Pay-to-Persist framework. Cancer cells found a way to lower metabolic costs (S[γ]), degrade coherent identity (R[γ]), and optimize for cell-level rather than organism-level persistence. Treatment strategy: close the exploits through metabolic targeting, differentiation therapy, and microenvironment normalization rather than just killing cells. Includes novel combination therapies, testable predictions, and clinical classification by exploit profile. Released under CC BY-SA 4.0 with viral open science requirements: any clinical trials, drug development, or commercial applications must publish results openly and share protocols. Cancer treatment must remain a commons.”
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18848384
I agree with everything here and agree that most if not all wellness influencers are whack - this is a genuine question for the researchers out there: People intutitively know that the elimination of certain things and/or the addition of certain supplements make them feel better and, realizing that correlation is not causation etc. etc., I think that this is often beyond what can be explained by a placebo effect. If the bottleneck is need for more human data, why not say...."no proof YET" or "early indicators suggest"....or other qualified statements? Do we know iit DOESN'T work? Has the null hypothesis been disproven?