Taking on the quacks
Marketing can be used for good or ill. On the good side, it is thanks to marketing that most Americans today own and use a toothbrush, that most Americans vaccinate their kids, that my coworkers use deodorant, and that I, living in Salt Lake City between the Rocky Mountains and the Utah desert, can enjoy food from all over the world, all year long.
Yet marketing comes with no built-in conscience. It is driven by whatever a buying public is willing to gobble up. Given that buyers do not always make rational choices and that many marketers lack scruples, there exist opportunities to harm as well as to help.
Thus there are, for instance, people who sell fake bomb-detectors to governments, careless of the thousands of soldiers who get blown to bits as a direct result.
There are the likes of Jenny McCarthy and Suzanne Sommers, who, apparently duped themselves, promote harmful, even life-threatening quackeries big-time.
I am grateful when high-profile persons or organizations take on nonsense and set the record straight. Here is an instance of Dateline NBC taking on the Suzanne Sommers quackery, and another concerning the bomb-detection scam, both reported by the James Randi Educational Foundation. I am a proud member of the JREF. I encourage you to bookmark the JREF blog. Should you feel moved to join and support them as I do, all the better.
—Steve Cuno
Marketing can be used for good or ill. On the good side, it is thanks to marketing that most Americans today own and use a toothbrush, that most Americans vaccinate their kids, that my coworkers use deodorant, and that I, living in Salt Lake City between the Rocky Mountains and the Utah desert, can enjoy food from all over the world, all year long.
Yet marketing comes with no built-in conscience. It is driven by whatever a buying public is willing to gobble up. Given that buyers do not always make rational choices and that many marketers lack scruples, there exist opportunities to harm as well as to help.
Thus there are, for instance, people who sell fake bomb-detectors to governments, careless of the thousands of soldiers who get blown to bits as a direct result.
There are the likes of Jenny McCarthy and Suzanne Sommers, who, apparently duped themselves, promote harmful, even life-threatening quackeries big-time.
I am grateful when high-profile persons or organizations take on nonsense and set the record straight. Here is an instance of Dateline NBC taking on the Suzanne Sommers quackery, and another concerning the bomb-detection scam, both reported by the James Randi Educational Foundation. I am a proud member of the JREF. I encourage you to bookmark the JREF blog. Should you feel moved to join and support them as I do, all the better.
—Steve Cuno
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