Quack remedies spread by virtue of being useless

[TZ]

Eating a vulture won't clear a bad case of syphilis nor will a drink made of rotting snakes treat leprosy, but these and other bogus medical treatments spread precisely because they don't work. That's the counterintuitive finding of a mathematical model of medical quackery.

Ineffective treatments don't cure an illness, so sufferers demonstrate them to more people than those who recovery quickly after taking real medicines.

"The assumption is that when people pick up treatments to try, they're basically observing other people," says Mark Tanaka, a mathematical biologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who led the study. "People don't necessarily know that what somebody is trying is going to work."

The World Health Organization is demanding better proof that folk medicines work before they can be approved. And the Malaysian government has rejected more than a third of the 25,000 applications to register traditional medicines it has received because the treatments are ineffective or dangerous.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17064-quack-remedies-spread-by-virtue-of-being-useless.html

I'm not surprised by these results. In fact, it explains the billion dollar woo industry in this country. With the lack of a lot of really deadly infectious diseases in this country, people can be sick longer with little consequence. And therefore the myth of being "helped" by these substances grow. So in other words, I believe the protection and health benefits that modern medicine provide in this country inadvertently led to the growth of the snake oil merchants success.

[salvorhardin]

1. I read that journal article when it came out

It's a really clever idea; looking at altmed from an anthropological perspective.