Snake Oil Salesmen

When I was a boy somebody once told me, “Don’t believe anything you hear and half of what you see.”  This advice stuck with me.  Later in childhood I became a great Houdini fan. I was amazed not only of tales of his escapes, but of his passion for exposing spirits mediums for what they were…fakes.   I feel that same passion for exposing medical quackery and fraud.    I have confronted many snake oil salesmen in open forums pushing magnets, power bracelets, or foot toxin absorbers. (All of these are a complete waste of money.)  When questioned all of these upstanding citizen will swear that their product is 100% proven effective.  When pressed really, really hard for scientific evidence, some will fall back to the stance that the scientific community will not publish real results because it would threaten them.  I have had a couple of “sales professionals” admit that they were selling placebos, but that was a good thing.  The ethics of that practice is a whole different subject.

Lately I have been more interested not in why unscrupulous people sell worthless products, but why people buy them.  There are two ways to think about this.  Why do some people believe these unbelievable marketing claims by the marketer?  But the other approach to this is why people dismiss scientifically accepted information.  Now the easy explanation is that people are just gullible.  I have to admit that I have tricked a few people to look up gullible in the dictionary.

I would like to know what you think about this subject.  Tweet me @DrHigginbotham

The Zombie Diet

In honor of May being Zombie Awareness Month, I thought I would examine the typical zombie diet. As we know, zombies are reanimated dead humans. They almost never have any higher order thought processes remaining. In fact, the term “mindless zombie” is very accurate. They generally rise with only one purpose—to find sustenance in the form of raw flesh. They are particularly fond of human flesh, often eating people while they are still alive and conscience. This situation is obviously horrifying to the person being eaten, especially if they do not know that zombies can only be stopped by destroying their brain. As for nutrition, Zombies follow a very strict combination of low carbohydrate diet and raw food diet. Do not even think of asking a zombie to eat carbs. Veggies are out—even killer tomatoes are safe. A zombie knows that carbs would cause them to get fat and slow them in pursuit of prey. Moreover, a zombie will never take time to cook its prey. They instinctively know just like all of the raw foodists that cooking humans destroys their nutritional value and actually makes them toxic. Unfortunately, the zombie diet doesn’t appear to be extremely healthy for them. The life expectancy of a zombie is extremely short, usually only a few days after rising from the dead. Humans are not really fond of having their brethren devoured, so zombies are hunted and destroyed without any bag limit even in Illinois. As you can see, I have proven that the low-carb and raw food diet are very dangerous and should be avoided.

A New Source of Energy

In honor of Earth Day let's think of some ingenious ways to save energy. Something better than forcing me to abuse alcohol by putting it in my gas tank. How about this: One of our country's fine biomedical engineers can find a way to use human fat for energy outside the body. That way all of that fat harvested during liposuction can be converted to gas, heating oil, biodeisel, or something. Wouldn't it feel better to put Heidi Montag in your gas tank rather than pure grain alcohol? Think of it. This could work so well that people could get paid to have liposuction. People that are particularly good at accumulating fat could do it every year and have their own small business. Since 2/3 of our population is overweight, this is a huge untapped energy source. I think everybody wins.