Institute For The Future

How Quack Treatments Go Mainstream

Ineffective medical treatments become popular due to their ineffectiveness. Or, at least that's the conclusion of Mark Tanaka in a recent article "From Traditional Medicine to Witchcraft: Why Medical Treatments Are Not Always Efficacious." Their conclusion, in effect, stems from the fact that people look to each other for advice and information about everything: including, and sometimes especially, about health. If a treatment works quickly and effectively, an average person might show the treatment off a bit to friends and family. But if the treatment fails, leaving this person sicker for a longer period of time, he'll keep using the remedy, keep showing it to friends and passing it along to others. On the other hand, successful cures are more likely to disappear because fewer people hear about them.

Their model, which is mathematical and not observational, gives new insight into how efforts like drinking a dead snake drink to treat leprosy or eating a vulture to treat syphilis have become popular, and also, more interestingly, on medical self-experimentation, even in places where peer review and other tenants of the scientific method are supposed to protect us.

In an effort to think through the study, pseuodnymous blogger Orac, who writes for the Science Blogs implies that modern communications could further the word-of-mouth effect for spurring on quackery. Specifically, Orac notes that television and other forms of mass communication open up opportunities for "Super Demonstrators" who, regardless of their credentials, garner public attention and spread their opinions. (For example, the actor Jim Carrey recently published an article questioning the safety of vaccines.)

The study's authors note that ineffective treatments are more likely to become popular for rare diseases, since, over time, ineffective treatments for more common illnesses will be exposed.