Defense of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop offers case study on how to sell snake oil
Over the last decade I&#x27;ve been having increasingly bad hay fever. The doctor said &quot;eat these pills&quot;. They worked but they made me fall  asleep right at my desk.<p>This year my girlfriend put me on some decent snake oil indeed. Tens of euros worth of food supplements per month. I also went to see an acupuncturist. My problems aren&#x27;t reduced, they&#x27;re <i>gone</i>. I can be outside for an entire day and not notice a thing. My problem is, 0% of what I did is evidence-based medicine.<p>Now, this is the whole issue with snake oil. Anecotes like mine don&#x27;t further science. But the Ars article puts all of Goop&#x27;s stuff on a single big pile of &quot;snake oil&quot;.<p>Isn&#x27;t it possible that there are things that work, even though they have not been scientifically proven yet? Why can&#x27;t there ever be a middle ground? I mean I also think homeopathy is a fraud. But I also know that either dried extract from Indian moringa trees or needles put into appropriate places in my body&#x27;s &quot;energy streams&quot;, or both combined, fixed all my problems. This is pretty major to me. I can live again.<p>In fact, I think there&#x27;s an upside to non-evidence-based things selling more: maybe at some point the sellers will earn enough money to be able to finance decent clinical trials.<p>Many forms of irritable bowel syndrome (a disease defined by a list of symptoms, for which &quot;there is no cure&quot;) can be fixed simply by changing your diet. I know someone who had stomach aches every day for 10 years and went to once a month <i>simply by eating oatmeal every morning</i>. Evidence based? No. I have no idea how you could ever design an affordable clinical trial for that, too many factors involed. The cost would be huge and the oatmeal industry doesn&#x27;t have deep enough pockets.<p>I think that to dismiss everything that&#x27;s not evidence based medicine as snake oil, like this article does, is just as bad as dismissing mainstream medicine like Goop appears to do.