How to Avoid Getting Conned by People, Including Yourself

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

--Richard Feynman

You could consider this section part of preventive medicine. Not only do you have to watch out for free radicals, oxidizing agents, cancer, and inflammation, you also have to watch out for errors in judgment, which can be just as harmful.

Assume nothing. This not only goes for people trying to sell you things, but also for well-meaning professionals who confidently tell you what they believe the truth is. This includes the material in this book. At the risk of losing your confidence, I’ll confess I am constantly making flight corrections in my thinking based on new, incoming data. You can’t hang on to any preconceptions to be a good scientist. It requires a great deal of humility and the willingness to constantly reexamine your preconceptions. It’s hard work to distrust everything you hear and read and think. The payback comes when data presented repeatedly backs up a story (otherwise known as a hypothesis), and then you feel excited that this story really could be true! It’s exhilarating to feel like you are on to something, to feel like you are approaching real truth. Paradoxically, we can’t ever trust that we get there. We actually do not prove anything in science. We just gain more and more support for various hypotheses, and some theories we have to toss out because what we observe doesn’t back them up. It’s an endless journey where we get closer and closer to the truth. People who say that this or that scientific theory can’t be true because scientists disagree over it don’t understand the nature of science. Science is not dogmatic and never “proves” anything. We do believe that constant questioning and reexamination of even the most agreed-upon theories brings us closer to the truth, and that some theories are definitely closer to the truth than others. These are decided upon not by consensus, but by evidence and reproducible experiments.

Science has no values or morals, but people do, and they vary from person to person. Science can’t tell you what is right and wrong, or how you should live your life. Some people say, “Science tells us we should take vitamins.” Or become vegetarian. Or do any number of things. But science only gives us information. It doesn’t say what we ought to do with the information. For example, science does not say whether or not you ought to smoke. It merely says that if you do, there is excellent evidence you will die earlier, possibly from lung cancer. It’s up to you to decide if you want that. Most people want to live longer, healthier lives, because that is a highly popular value. Since more subtle values vary widely from person to person, different people use the information from science in various ways, and then they look at each other and get annoyed. When someone advises doing this or that because “science says so,” the purpose of science is misunderstood. Science is merely a tool that allows us to give more credence to some theories than others.

You don’t have to be a scientist to determine whether information on herbs is reliable.

There are simple ways to look at herb sellers’ information and scientific data to determine whether or not it looks suspicious. Here are some classic red flags to watch out for. These flags don’t necessarily mean the information is bad, but it does mean you need to be extra careful.

But I saw it on TV.

Consider the source. The best source of herbal data is, unfortunately, very boring and technically troublesome to read. It appears in scientific abstracts in reputable journals. But even this is no guarantee. Some journals are trustworthier than others. Sometimes the research appearing in these journals was funded--and it can be in a very roundabout way--by herb companies trying to give their product more credibility. Even with the best of intentions this can taint researchers’ interpretation of the data. This is why double-blinded studies are far better than “unblinded” ones.

Is the study well-designed? In double-blind studies, neither the investigators nor the study volunteers know who is taking what. Ideally, there ought to be a placebo, too, and some group of volunteers must swallow something with no known pharmacological action, because just the act of taking something will often make people feel better. That’s the placebo effect. Having a placebo group “controls” for this effect. In studies of women with hot flashes, for example, a placebo group is essential. Of course hot flashes are horribly real, but they are something that the mind is better able to assume power over and fix than, say, a broken leg. In studies of women with hot flashes taking herbal medicines, they typically do outstandingly well--in the placebo group! That they do just as well with the herb means the herb probably doesn’t exert any pharmacological action. But the patients’ brains did. Part of judging the source requires that you look at how the study was designed.

Is it significant?

Herbs causing an increase or decrease in this or that effect doesn’t mean very much. If you lose a pound, it doesn’t mean as much as losing ten pounds. Statistical methods have evolved to help estimate whether an effect is truly caused by the agent being tested, because it could be due to chance. Look for “significant” effects. The term means the effect is less likely caused by chance, but it still could be. If you want to weed through abstracts yourself, look for a probability value, or P value, of less than 0.05. You will see something like “p<0.05” in the text, which means the parameter measured was statistically significant, and the smaller the P value is, the less likely the effect is due to chance. It’s no guarantee, but it’s an agreed-upon standard that helps you estimate which effects you should pay attention to and which you should ignore.

In the “Evidence of Action” sections for each herb in this book, you will find summaries of some of the best clinical trial data so far on these herbs. A mind-boggling number of the hard-to-read abstracts are available for everyone to read on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Web site .

Look at the type of advertisements featured alongside articles on herbs. Eventually results from these trials, both good, well-designed ones and poorly designed ones, filter down to the more popular news media. The more a magazine features ads for herbs and supplements, the more likely they will enthuse about how wonderful herbs are, to an almost hysterical pitch. They aren’t necessarily wrong about some things, but what they say should be taken with a big grain of salt.

It kills cancer cells, in a test tube . . . and every other kind of cell, too.

This is what you call poison. It’s great if an herb can kill cancer cells, bacterial cells, and disable viruses, and many do. But the herb ought to be kind to your own cells, too. Be sure the herb does that as well. Studies performed on animals or isolated cells are not guaranteed to relate to humans. Studies of herbs on humans are more persuasive.

But they know so many big words.

Using heady terms from quantum mechanics like “quantum” to sell just about everything has recently become popular, but it doesn’t mean that the person has any idea what they are talking about, because quantum mechanics has nothing to do with herbs. But it does sound very impressive. (A quantum, by the way, is not as impressive as marketers make it sound, but most marketers using the term have no idea what it means, anyway. A quantum is a small unit of energy or material that comes in fixed sizes.) If the source of herbal information uses jargon that seems out of place, be suspicious. Some companies make up new jargon.

These herbs were used for millennia by ancient, exotic people who are now all dead.

Often a romantic picture is presented of some ancient, exotic race benefiting from use of a particular herb. It assumes people in the past knew better than we do now. They surely did know a lot more about many things, like how to live off the land using their own hands, so there is a grain of truth in this. They also didn’t know a lot of things we know today, and many medieval “cures,” like rubbing open wounds with feces, and killing the cats that hunted their plague-infested rats, have been discarded. It helps to investigate herbs that folkloric use supports, but the herbs must be tested using modern methods, too. That people used an herb in the past is no guarantee that it works or is safe.

It’s just the latest thing.

Some people are moved by images of the past, others by new technology. Like information from the past, new technology can be extremely helpful. New technology often brings with it a wave of scams. Over the past century, people have tried using soft drinks, electricity, radiation, and magnetism therapeutically because of the promise surrounding anything “new.” Soft drinks don’t hurt unless they are filled with sugar, and magnets don’t do anything as far as we can tell, but the enthusiastic, indiscriminate application of radiation by people thrilled by science’s discovery of it was a bad idea. Just because it’s new doesn’t make it better.

Your body is full of toxins.

A centuries-old idea that undefined toxins cause health problems has resulted in attacks of the body from above and below with laxatives and enemas, which frequently cause more harm than good. “Cleansing the blood” was a turn-of-the-century euphemism for curing syphilis, yet this phrase persists in many modern herb books. The concept of a “healing crisis,” where you feel worse before you can feel better due to “released toxins,” is part of this common mythology. Your body is generally great at neutralizing toxins, and it’s an excellent idea to expose yourself to less of them. Give your body some credit, and trust that it can manage what toxins you do encounter without harsh purgatives.

It’s all-natural, so it can’t hurt you.

A quick glance at poisonous mushrooms, hemlock, and venomous snakes should convince you this is not true. We have 100 percent natural tsunamis, too. Nature can kill us, and “natural” has no legal meaning on a label.

It’s a conspiracy.

Disreputable claims are accompanied by claims of conspiracy and persecution committed by the “medical establishment.” Some herbal companies have even suggested that they are being persecuted because doctors secretly don’t want to cure disease, so they can make more money off all the sick people. Some have even likened themselves to famous persecuted figures in history, saying, “They didn’t believe Galileo either.” It’s pretty hard to stomach--so don’t swallow it.

Your rights are being taken away from you by the government, because they want us to disclose how much mercury is contaminating our herb.

Many of the better herb sellers test their products, cooperating with independent testing groups like Consumerlab, to get a seal of approval. But those who would rather not may try to scare you into thinking that your government is trying to stop you from taking herbs. Relax. The government will not stop you from taking herbs. They aren’t going to raid your garden’s mint patch. It’s just that some herb sellers know they have been guilty of letting products slip by that are contaminated with heavy metals and pesticides, and they’d rather not deal with correcting the problem. Sometimes they have even been caught “spiking” herbs with drugs undeclared on the label, like wild yam with progesterone, and hoodia with caffeine. Companies who don’t want their herbs tested should be regarded with suspicion.

It cured my aunt’s arthritis.

Anecdotes and testimonials make wonderful, inspiring stories, and many are true. But they do not prove anything one way or another. Products that sport countless testimonials, and no clinical trials, are questionable.

This product was tested in clinical trials.

It looks impressive in an advertisement, but they don’t say the results of the trials. You will find this for some products selling homeopathic arnica, for example. If you read the results from the trials on PubMed, you will see they all have very sad outcomes, even with one experiment showing that the placebo group did better than those taking the arnica! Some products are also “approved by the FDA,” but this does not mean the FDA tested them, and it does not mean they are safe or effective.

It cures every kind of cancer.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true. Some herb sellers make eyebrow-raising claims for curing every disease and living forever. One unintentionally funny advertisement for a kombucha mushroom product blindly declares the herb was “used by ancient Manchurians as a cure for immortality.” However, just because a claim is extraordinary doesn’t mean it isn’t true either. We are now finding extraordinary cures in medicine, for example. Yet the more astonishing the claim, the more you should stand back and weigh the evidence. As Carl Sagan put it, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Other data? What other data?.

Scientists and nonscientists alike fall victim to selecting data that supports their claim and ignoring evidence that does not. This is called data selection, and it happens to the best of us with the finest of intentions. We just have to guard against it. Here’s a classic case of data selection: Although many people claim that more crime, violence, or births occur on a full moon, statistics repeatedly show that this is not true. People notice when the moon is full and make a mental note of a correlation, yet forget the instances when they do not see a full moon. Another instance of “milking the data” has recently created a multitude of glossy advertisements suggesting that dairy products help people lose weight. Low fat dairy products probably are healthy for most people and these claims that diary products enhance weight loss may even be true. However, the theory requires more research and currently has very little evidence to support it, since a couple of well-designed experiments that you don’t hear about contradict it. What makes these ads disturbing is that one person with a patent on the claim is profiting from them, and his claim is based on some very small, poorly designed experiments which he funded. When examining nutritional claims in advertisements, don’t look at how often the advertisement is publicized. Look at all the data.