How The Health Industry Fools You
8 ideas to be a well-informed consumer
Hello,
The world we inhabit is built on a foundation of endless selling. Without it, the entire house of cards can collapse.
Because of this dangerous incentive structure, companies manufacture all sorts of schemes and scams to ensure they can endlessly sell more and more.
Often, they come up with new ways to do it even when their customers have filled their 1 BHKs to the brim with shit they don’t need, financed with EMIs they can’t service.
As the scams get sophisticated, the onus is on YOU- the consumer- to get wiser about the tricks and defend your (shrinking) wallet in the marketplace.
So here are 8 thought-provoking ideas that shine a light on the techniques of deception rampant in the health, wellness, and pharma industry.
Knowledge is power. Know them well so you’re wiser about your choices. Here we go:
Mean regression: Many alternative medicines probably don’t work, but the fact that many ailments get cured either with the passage of time or the placebo effect makes people think they’re genuine. People offering them make predictions like “The disease will get worse before getting better”, and when this does end up being the case, people feel like they’re geniuses. But what they described is nothing but regression to the mean- after getting to the worst point, they always have to get better. Voltaire made a brilliant point when he said “Medicine is the art of amusing the patient while nature cures him”.
Seductive details effect: We prefer explanations that sound more complicated and *sciencey* over simpler ones, even if the details added in the former don’t matter at all. This is the seductive details effect, and can be effectively used in selling all sorts of wellness products that are meant to attract us with their high-tech benefits pitch while we drown in the jargon and part with our money. This brings us to the next critical point.
Privatization of common sense: Spin-doctors in the world of health and wellness often sell us the same old things that work (like a balanced diet with green veggies) but packaged in heavy, seductive jargon (special high-ketamine ortho-paleo diet for Rs 5 Lakh per month only), such that we suspend our thinking and believe that we *have to* follow what the experts suggest to get it right. This is the privatisation of common sense- even the regular, old-school ideas of staying healthy are complicated so we feel that we can’t do without expert guidance (and, more importantly, their products) to stay healthy. If that were really true, so many of our 90 yo grandparents woulnd’t have gotten so far only with their common-sense, no-bullshit lifestyle.
Deceptive statistics: Media headlines say “Risk of this cancer DOUBLED for those who eat apples”. Going into the details will reveal that the risk went up from 1 person in 5 billion to 2 people in 5 billion. Framing the data to generate clickbait is just one tiny example of how the health & wellness discourse is designed to mess with us. To get smarter at detecting this, I’d recommend the book How To Lie With Statistics.
Placebo Effect: Sometimes medicines work not because of pharmacological, but psychological reasons. The fact that we’re being given something that’ll cure us affects our minds and proves very helpful for recovery. The colour of the pill, how bad it tastes (or how painful a treatment is), how sciencey they sound- all affect their effectiveness. Not just that. Even a placebo diagnosis, where someone just gives you a (fake) diagnosis of your condition can provide relief! That may explain why people are so attracted to alternative medicine- the confident-sounding diagnoses might often do the trick (even if their medicines do nothing). I mentioned this in my 23 Ideas from 2023 article (read it, it is quite illuminating)
Coming up with a brand new happiness pill Study shenanigans: Pharma companies often game their studies so they can get positive results for their new medicines. There are too many ways to do this: a) not publishing the negative results b) taking a sample of only young & healthy people in the study so the chances of adverse results go down, c) using placebos for comparison when they can compare with the best available treatment instead, d) publishing their (shady) results in some obscure journal so it doesn’t attract much scrutiny These are but a handful of the tactics used by companies hell-bent on torturing the data till it says what they want it to say. One must be careful before believing any study they see on the internet.
Medicalization of everything: Our major pharma breakthroughs happened in the 70s, after which the pace of new discoveries dropped radically. To continue making mouthwatering profits, big pharma has resorted to the oldest trick: invent problems when you can’t invent solutions. That’s why we’re seeing a proliferation of new disorders and ailments like “night eating syndrome” (and might soon get crap like hair-scratching mania)- and the solution is to just pop a brand new pill launched to target this “disease”. Turning regular problems into syndromes/disorders is grossly diesmpowering, and something people must carefully dissect.
Manufacturing doubt: Whenever a product is shown to be harmful, the #1 tactic by brands producing is to publish a counter-study and cast doubt on the original findings. This has the quality of devilish genius because when someone publishes studies to counter the initial claims, it turns into a scientific debate that induces yawns and is ignored by people who can’t spare a few seconds on such nuanced discussions out of their 5-hour daily Netflix+Insta budget. As a result, the deadly warnings that we ought to pay attention to are drowned away by this sick move. As a tobacco executive once said, “Doubt is our product”.
As it may be clear by now, the health industry is full of lies and subterfuge- and one must understand the nature of big business to see how their incentives are pitted against yours.
Given this simple fact, it’s on us to do our research, seek out multiple opinions, and be mindful of the ‘facts’ we pay attention to so we don’t get fooled into believing things that aren’t true.
That’s it for the day, friends. If you liked this, share it with friends who keep falling for the latest fads and blowing mouthwatering sums of money on shady products/influencers.
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