Top Ten Tips For Creating Your Own New Alternative Medicine

L0029760 Lithographed song sheet cover: 'The Quack's Song' Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Lithographed song sheet cover: 'The Quack's Song' composed by F. C. Burnand and W. Meyer Lutz. Lithograph circa 1900 By: Stannard & SonPublished: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The economic downturn may mean that you are thinking of retraining as an alternative healer. You might be tempted to invest your redundancy money or savings in training courses and equipment. Think again. It may be far cheaper and much more lucrative to invent your own brand new form of quackery. Most forms of alternative medicine are at most only a few decades old or have only become popular recently. If others can become famous and wealthy by doing this, why can’t you?

Here is the Quackometer’s Guide to inventing a new branch of alternative medicine in ten easy to digest and holistic tips:

1. Minimise specific effects

Right. Let’s get one thing out of the way. Your newly designed alternative medicine is very unlikely to actually work. Progress in medicine does not happen with people just making stuff up, but instead relies on remarkable insight, careful analysis, detailed research and long and expensive clinical trials, with lots of false starts and wrong turns before progress is made. You will not have the time, inclination, money or intellect for this.

So, with little chance of being able to offer real benefit to your clients, the best you can do is to ensure you do as little as harm as possible. To this end, make sure your new quackery is inert, neutral and inconsequential in action. Take your inspiration from existing and successful alternative medicine. Homeopathy is just plain sugar pills. Acupuncture is just little pin pricks. Reiki is just hand waving. Bach Flower Remedies is just a few drops of brandy. Reflexology is just a foot massage. Even chiropractic is just a vigorous body rub.

If you make the mistake of delivering real effects, then you may well be found out and your new business will come to sticky end. That is why we do not see old sorts of quackery anymore such as blood letting and trepanning.

2. Maximise placebo effects

Make your treatment theatrical. Make your customer feel as if they have been listened to, been taken seriously, and then had lots of effort made on them to create a cure. This will ensure any available placebo effect is maximised. People will feel better about themselves if you make the effort. We know that the more dramatic the intervention, the greater any placebo effect will be.

So, spend at least an hour with your customer, asking lots of detailed questions, just like a homeopath. Use arcane terms and be thoroughly paternalistic, just like an old-fashioned doctor. Wear a white coat and have a brass plaque outside your spick and span clinic – just like a chiropractor. Get an impressive Harley Street address. Use equipment with dials and flashing lights. Take x-rays. Put certificates on your wall and, if you are doing well, have attractive receptionists. Give the impression you are creating your cure just for this patient. They are special. Make them feel so.

3. Choose what you want to cure carefully

The bread and butter illnesses for alternative medicine are the self-limiting (hayfever, flu, morning sickness) and the chronic but variable and cyclical (bad backs, arthritis, mild depression). The number one reason for people believing in alternative medicine is that it ‘works for them’. What this means is that their particular complaint just happened to improve sometime after rubbing whatever magic beans they had chosen.

Chronic illnesses are ideal – they represent repeat business. Bad backs are a classic. People will come to you when their backs are really playing up. Cast your spells, crack their bones and stick a pin in them and their pain will become less noticable. It will have gone away anyway. But now you have a loyal and evangelical customer. Correlation is causation to your customer. “Regression to the mean” is your friend. Understand it and use it.

Have excuses ready if things are not quite getting better yet – or even if things are getting worse. Homeopaths expect to see ‘aggravations’, that is, things getting worse before they get better. To them, it is more proof that the sugar pills are ‘working’. Have a story ready for every outcome, good or bad. Never admit you have failed.

Avoid illnesses with obvious end points, like death. Getting payment may be the least of your problems. If you want to be heroic and tackle illnesses like AIDS and cancer, best do it offshore. Find a country with fewer regulations, much lower standards of healthcare and more vulnerable people. Homeopaths tend to go to Africa to treat AIDS or prevent malaria. They might be imprisoned here. Find a nice spot in Spain for treating cancer. Or Mexico, if you are from the US.

Invent a ‘wellness’ programme. Tell people you can help them even if they are feeling fine. It’s preventative, you see. Chiropractors are masters at  roping people into prolonged, expensive and unnecessary treatment programmes, all in the name of ‘wellness’. Nutritionists ensure people are popping highly ‘personalised’ lists of vitamin and mineral pills and creating a continuous and easy revenue stream for you.

Perhaps the most lucrative path is to invent illnesses. Create your own problems, diagnostic techniques and cures and you can provide an end-to-end service of imaginary illnesses and cures. The Detox industry has thrived on this. Food intolerances and allergies have made shed loads for vitamin pill sellers. Electrosensitives have been sold millions of pounds worth of useless EMF trinkets and neutralising boxes.  People love their daily aches and pains, tiredness and mood swings to have a name and to have something to blame. You can provide a wonderful service by filling in the gaps for them.

4. Embrace the language of quackery

It is compulsory that you start using a few alternative medicine terms. ‘Holistic’ is probably the most important one. It will mark you out as a caring alternative type who wants to get to the ‘real’ causes of your illness, rather than superficial, but ‘money spinning’ ones, like viruses, genes and your smoking habit.

It does not really matter how monomaniacal your treatment is. All homeopaths ever do is dish out sugar pills and blame problems with your vital force. Acupuncturists stick pins in you and blame blocked Chi. A chiropractor will crack bones, even if you have an ear infection, and blame subluxations. Toxins cause all illness. So do parasites, acidic blood, vitamin and mineral depletion, miasms, vibrations, whatever. Pick one and stick to it. Describe yourself as holistic. No one will notice that you are the exact opposite.

‘Natural’ is another compulsory word. Do not trouble yourself that your treatment is completely unnatural. Vitamin pill sellers claim naturalness, despite their ‘food’ being the most highly processed and ‘space age’ form of nutrition imaginable. Be careful about what sort of ‘naturalness’ you highlight. Bach Flower Remedies work because they embrace the ‘goodness’ of the countryside hedgerow flowers. As John Diamond remarked, the public imagination might not have been quite so transfixed by ‘Bach Spider Remedies’.

Avoid using the term ‘alternative’ to describe your ‘medicine’. It is very 20th Century, and also frightens a potential lucrative source of income – government and insurance companies.  Even ‘complementary’ medicine is falling out of favour. The hot button is ‘Integrative’. You want your business integrated with the health care provision of the state and private sectors. There is lucre there beyond your wildest fantasies – and the respectability of state endorsement. You do not want to be an alternative to a real doctor. Nor do  you want to be complementary to them (some may see this as secondary and inferior). No, you want to be a ‘choice’ – a ‘lifestyle choice’ for the modern health consumer, and they can select you from within a single integrated market. Choice is the biggest biggest buzz word in healthcare politics in the UK. Make sure you offer it. People critising you will look like they are restricting consumer choice – always a bad thing.

5. Adopt the victim posture

Sooner or later, you may be asked why your new medicine has not been more wildly accepted and recognised by the medical establishment. The answer is simple: you are being suppressed by that very establishment. A powerful cabal of vested interests is trying to prevent the public from knowing about your discoveries and successes. ‘Big Pharma’ is the bogey man here. Use them to frighten the child in your customer. Highlight medicine’s failings and side effects and never mention their successes. If a critic highlights the successes of medicine, deny them and blame sanitation or fresh vegetables, or something. Under no circumstances, should you ever admit that a vaccination might be a good thing.

Say your invention cannot be patented and commercialised. No one can make money out of it (apart from you, but don’t mention that).

If a critic asks you for evidence about your treatment, then do anything but answer the direct question. Scream that the questioner is closed minded and probably a shill from Big Pharma. Say that your patients’ successes are all the proof you need. Claim that your technique does not lend itself well to ‘conventional’ scientific testing. But if some dodgy paper does exist, then wave it around furiously, despite just having claimed that science cannot measure what you do.

6. Wear the mantle of science

People love science. They do not understand it, but they love the authority of science. Most people form opinions based on various authorities in their life. So, embrace the authority of scientific language, but ignore the methods of science – the methods may show you are speaking hogwash. Your customers will not be interested in the details. They will never check references or take the time to understand what you mean. But they will be impressed by science experts and scientific language.

Quantum physics is your friend. Few people have any appreciation of it. And you can use the language of quantum physics to form cod explanations for whatever you like. Prefix the word ‘quantum’ to your treatment name. It sounds really impressive. Tell critics that they are stuck in a ‘Newtonian paradigm’ and that it is the quantum physicists that are really understanding what you do. Get a postmodernist sociologist to write some quantum gobbledegook to back up your claims. They will have no qualms – after all, science is just another ‘text’ and all viewpoints are valid. Another good trick is to claim foreign scientists back up your work. This makes it much harder to check. Russian science is a good bet – especially Russian scientists working on the space programme. Failing that, Chinese science is an excellent alternative, or even obscure Eastern European Universities. Cheeky people claim NASA pioneered their work. Few check.

Adopt the forms, behaviours and appearances of scientists. Once you get going, hold seminars and conferences. Book rooms in real universities to add kudos to the meeting. Remember to always book university rooms in the Medicine or Pharmacology departments, and never in Engineering, English literature or Law. Create a learned journal and publish ‘peer reviewed’ articles. However, never talk about data – that would be getting to be too close to real science. And you want to avoid that like the plague.

7. Envelop yourself in ancient origins

Having embraced the authority of science, you should also delve back into the historical origins of your treatments. Do not say that you have discovered your techniques – rather you have rediscovered them. Most alternative medicine has only really been around for the last fifty to a hundred years or so. Even Traditional Chinese Medicine was packaging and refinement made in communist China and then exported to the world.

Take a leaf out of the Ear Candling trade. They picked on an obscure American Indian tribe on which to base their claims of antiquity. Despite the Hopi writing to the manufacturers to deny the claims and to request they stop using their name, nothing has changed. People like to think they are tapping into ‘ancient wisdom’ and more ‘natural’ health approaches. Preferably use an Oriental connection. This is much more beguiling (and also harder to check). Ear acupuncture was invented in France and reflexology in America. Both are now found as part of the ‘traditional’ Chinese repertoire.

You may base your technique on some genuinely old practices like herbalism or acupuncture. But always overplay your ancientness. Acupuncture is claimed to be thousands of years old, despite thin steel needles not being invented until the seventeenth century and the first acupuncture point charts appearing at the same time. (Ancient China used bloodletting techniques with sharp flint blades – and this has been ‘re-interpreted’ as acupuncture).

8. Adorn yourself with titles and awards

Chiropractors love to put a brass plate outside of their office with the title ‘Dr’ on it, despite them not being medically qualified or having a higher research degree. It works though, so use it. People believe chiropractic to be some sort of medical discipline. If you do adopt the title ‘Dr’, it is also compulsory in alternative medicine circles to suffix your name with Ph.D too. It is a giveaway that you are a quack to sceptics, but your customers will be thoroughly impressed.

If you do not have a PhD then do not worry too much. There are correspondence courses where you can get one for a few thousand quid. A wise investment. Gillian McKeith was unlucky in being caught out. Chances are, you will not be. If you really have balls, just style yourself Dr anyway. It is not a protected title – it is yours to use.

But don’t stop there. How about Professor? You might get lucky, like Patrick Holford did for a while, and get invited by a minor university to teach. The title ‘Visiting Professor’ is so grand. Even easier, claim you are a professor from a very obscure overseas university. If it has burnt down and no longer has a web site, your claim is impossible to check. It will still get you onto the comfy sofas of day-time TV.

Awards are also impressive. Get someone to nominate you for a Nobel Prize. Anyone can do this. They may not accept your nomination, but hey? It is compulsory in alternative medicine circles to be nominated more than once, so you can describe yourself as ‘three times nominated for the Nobel Prize’. The Nobel Committee does not publish lists of nominees for understandable reasons. Otherwise, they would have to list my cat who I have annually nominated for the Economics prize.

9. Create two web sites and embrace weasel words

Legal matters need some attention. But not much. If you are selling through a web site, best not make too many bold claims about the effectiveness of your treatments.  Trading Standards Authorities may come down on you like a ton of bricks. There is an easy way out: create two web sites. On the first, make as many bold claims as you like. Create a newsletter and ‘Health Club’. Fill your site with all your speculative and unproven nonsense. But, whatever you do, do not sell your product – maybe, just a few books. What you are doing is creating a ‘brand’. Then, set up a second, apparently unconnected site, that sells whatever you like and trades on your brand, but makes only very bland claims and no real claims to effectiveness. Easy. Sometimes, the web is so full of nonsense that might support the sale of your daft product, you do not need the first site: just tell punters to Google it, like Julian Graves does.

Be careful what you say in advertising. Do not claim to be able to cure things. Instead, claim to ‘treat’ illnesses. You may be totally unsuccessful, but you are not lying. Your punter will not notice the subtle difference between treating and curing. Learn lessons from Chinese High Street Herbalists who simply list ailments on the windows of their shops whilst making no claims whatsoever. Look at the Society of Homeopaths for their excellent exposition of weasel words.

10. Create a training programme and set up a regulator

Finally, to rake in true wonga, do not just sit around waiting for your next mark to visit you and hand over fifty quid. Real money is made by training others in your new practice. Set up a correspondence course and training programme. Set up an ‘Institute’ and award diplomas and certificates. A very minor university may even accredit you. It does not matter that your course is just made up idiocy, all that matters to Universities is that paying students will attend. They will tick the boxes to show that you are properly setting ‘learning objectives’ and ‘assessment strategies’ and you are away. Chiropractors have this one sown up with Universities underwriting their degrees. Take a lesson from them and ensure you tell your students that they are getting an equivalent ‘post graduate’ education to a medical doctor, even if this is patently false. Also, learn from chiropractors and spend half the time teaching them good business practices. You do not want your students to fail commercially.

Writing training materials may be hard work. You could follow the Reiki method, which is essentially a pyramid scam. Reiki practitioners are ‘trained’ by having a previously trained Reiki healer ‘attune’ them – essentially, wave their hands over them in a special way. Fees get passed back up the chain. They can then go on to ‘attune’ other people – usually ex-customers. Marvellous.

Then you can really kick off with the accreditation thing. ‘Skills for Health’, the government training quango, can then develop National Occupational Standards for you, just like they are doing for Homeopathy and Reiki. It matters not one jot that these subjects are pseudoscientific balderdash, you can gain nationally accredited skills training programmes in your new money spinning exercise.

Finally, all good alternative medicine should have a ‘regulator’. To the public, it will look like their chosen healer is being monitored for the efficacy and safety of their work. To you, it is a good advertising device and channel for new customers. There are hundreds of regulators for alternative medicine in the UK. All have one thing in common – they will never condemn or criticise any of your practices, or strike you off for anything other than sexual misconduct – and then, at a push. You will be safe to do what you like without fear of being judged by the ‘regulator’.

Even the UK government will provide this sort of service to you. The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, or Ofquack, was set up this year by Prince Charles and his Foundation for Integrated Health and a government grant of £900,000 to be a ‘one stop shop’ regulator for all manner of quacks. However, they have made it quite clear that they are not interested if the treatments actually work, but only if the member has been trained in their alternative medicine and have insurance cover. It matters not at all that the training might be utterly delusional and result in dangerous advice to customers. All the boxes have been ticked.

 

 

And so there you are. Not too hard. Finally, the best top tip I can give you is for you to find a way to start believing in your own bullshit. You will appear far more convincing to people if you believe yourself. As Richard Feynman said “The first principle [in science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool”. If you are not interested in truth then hurry along and get fooling yourself. It should be easy. Once you have done that, fooling everyone else is a doddle.

Good luck, and check back on these pages for when I write about you.

28 Comments on Top Ten Tips For Creating Your Own New Alternative Medicine

  1. Brilliant! As a sequel, how about top ten tips for creating your own new alternative religion? 1. Invent something sooo stupid loads of people will believe it – something with volcanoes and aliens perhaps…Damn! Too late. 🙁

  2. I notice that you fail to mention fear, uncertainty and doubt. FUD is important. Creating FUD about conventional medicine is essential.

    Anxiety.

  3. Fantastic post. The part about maximising placebo effects is particularly timely since just a few days ago a traditional acupuncturist, who apparently runs one of the most lauded acupuncture clinics in the UK, appeared to come very close to admitting that acupuncture is nothing more than a theatrical placebo…

    Quote:
    “We don’t heal anyone; we move things around so that nature and the individual can heal themselves.

    -snip-

    What I do is about so much more than needles. It is about giving people the chance to work things out for themselves. You don’t have to have something wrong with you to see me. You just have to want to find out who you really are.”

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/alternativemedicine/5055611/Acupuncture-Guy-of-the-needles.html

    And re chiropractors being masters at roping people into prolonged, expensive and unnecessary treatment programmes, all in the name of ‘wellness’ – if chiropractors’ provision of ‘wellness care’ really did work, then it would be reasonable to assume that their longevity would be on a par with that of medical doctors or, at the very least, the general population. However, according to this recent US survey – which was conducted by a chiropractor – chiropractors’ life-spans are shorter than both:

    Quote:
    “Two separate data sources were used to examine chiropractic mortality rates.

    One source used obituary notices from past issues of Dynamic Chiropractic from 1990 to mid-2003. The second source used biographies from Who Was Who in Chiropractic – A Necrology covering a ten year period from 1969–1979.

    The two sources yielded a mean age at death for chiropractors of 73.4 and 74.2 years respectively.

    The mean ages at death of chiropractors is below the national average of 76.9 years and is below their medical doctor counterparts of 81.5.”

    Morgan, L. Does Chiropractic ‘Add Years to Life’? J Can Chiropr Assoc. 2004 September; 48(3): 217–224
    http://www.jcca-online.org/client/cca/JCCA.nsf/objects/V48-3-P217-224/$file/V48-3-P217-224.pdf

    Sad, but true.

  4. Brilliant article Andy.

    In a sane world that would be a ridiculous satire which was totally OTT.

    In this world it is a viable business plan for rooking the gullible and stupid.

  5. Thanks John. I did actually want to write it as a satire, but alternative medicine is impossible to satirise. There is nothing too bonkers or too cynical that has not been done for real.

  6. The conventional medical industry is making tons of money off of sick people by just treating their symptoms and not the cause, what do you say about that? Or how about the prescription medicines that have more dangerous side effects than the actual ailment?

    • “What do you say about that?” I would say that no amount of side-effects in effective medicine would make quackery any more valid.

  7. You hit the nail on the head there.

    I invented a HY remedy based on fossilised trilobite.

    This was intended as a joke on DCs site.

    And lo and behold our old woomeisters Ainsworths already do fossilised trilobite.

    It is getting virtually impossible to take the piss out of this rubbish.

    Or indeed to bother with idiots like anonymous above.

  8. Hi Anonymous. I apologise for leaving out the ‘canards’ section whereby anyone in alternative medicine must say that real doctors ” treat their symptoms and not the cause” even though this is obvious bollocks. Oh, and you must, must must scare people about their prescription medicines that are just designed to make money and never do any good. All good canards. Thanks for reminding us.

  9. What I say about it anonymouse is take lung cancer. Of course doctors treat the symptoms. It is the symptoms that kill you. There is little point in trying to treat the cause (smoking) by the time lung cancer has metastised.

    Of course pharmas make shedloads of cash selling medicine to the sick – they are private businesses (by and large). However, they do operate in an extremely rigid and tightly controlled regulatory environment – the sort of regulation that would make a quack run away gibbering in terror.

    I hear a lot from anonymouse quacks about all these medicines which are worse than the illness. What are they ? Personally I reckon going bald is a fair exchange for getting cured of cancer.

    Do the unpleasant side effects go on for ever or are they transient while the medicine is working.

    What specifically did you have in mind ?

  10. You omitted the chanting of the standard paragraphs from the astrologers/tarot readers/etc. books on vague things to say that make the cashcow certain that you completely understand the emotional side to their problems. “You aren’t feeling well because someone you care about is doing poorly.” The emotional connection should really help maximize the placebo effect, because you really understand their pain: emotional and physical. If it does not work too well, then emotional empathy will pave over all doubts. The phrase books for the mental scamquacks cover every situation.

  11. The biggest quack is this website itself.

    Consider the infamous words of the man considered to one of the most intelligent but evil of all time, A.Hitler:

    If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.

    All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.

    By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.

    How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think. What good fortune for governments that the people do not think.

  12. I think I might ban Anonymous commenters. They rarely add anything useful – and mostly just hide acute stupidity behind their anonymity. And before ananymous gets upset, I am not asking for names, addresses etc, just that you adopt a consistent online identity so that you be accountable for your daftness.

  13. So, come on Anonymous. Can you offer a critique of this post, rather than looking to Hitler for your inspiration? What aspect of alt med have I characterised here that is unfair or wrong? Anything? Can you make a coherent response? In short, can you substantiate your claim that this is just a lie?

  14. by Placebo-Overdose:
    The value of your business will increase even further by creating letters to add to your qualification such as

    A.M.G.N.I.for associated members or M.G.N.I. for full members.

    Yes I know that’s one letter less but you should not use the F-word

  15. Richard Feynman said “The first principle [in science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool”

    Just make sure that you are not fooling yourself by only seeing what you expect in CAM. Many people will know a person or persons in CAM who do not fit your stereotype.

  16. “Many people will know a person or persons in CAM who do not fit your stereotype.”

    Please let them step forward. Are they for real, or are they just the best deceivers? (Including self-deceivers.)

  17. With such an apparently comprehensive dislike of all other than allopathic as displayed by the instigator of this site, one wonders about the wisdom of dignyfing such work with a response. However as a novice to social media and with a professional interest in balance and fairness I would like to be informed of the mechanics of posting (specifally to the chiropractic section which does not have this comment box facility). Ynot Cod

  18. Ynot – you make assumptions – this site is not motivated by a ‘comprehensive dislike of all other than allopathic’ (whatever that is) but by a dislike of charlatanism and quackery – and a fascination of why people believe obvious rubbish. If you would like to add to that debate, then please go ahead (some pages had an error), although expect a hard time if you just post about anecdotes and wishful thinking.

  19. Very good article for a person with a limited perception of what health is really about! Isn't part of healing giving back the power to the patient on all levels? Isn't conventional medicine about keeping patients as victims and making them powerless? Health is in the mind and how we interpret our environment, our cells are communities. Health cannot be compartmentalized and ridiculed with shoddy 'modern science'! This article just shows how fearful some people really are about who they are….wake up!!

  20. Sheer brilliance! Fortunately I already have a PhD from an obscure correspondence university and will be signing up for my Royal Society of Medicine library card today….

    Please add my new website (as soon as I have enough false claims to put one up) so I may counter your arguement by calling Le Canard Noir a Big Pham Mac, and gain extra points with the lonely and gullible…

    Best wishes

    Dr Bob Qango PhD (PiL, HoCUS, Deconstructal-post-structuralist)

  21. I also love that alties claim to treat the causes rather than the symptoms, even though alties don’t believe in germs or vaccines.

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