All-Natural Snake Oil: Difference between revisions

** Also spoofed in [http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2002-02-05 this] comic strip.

** [http://dilbert.com/strip/2011-03-29 "I'm writing a press release for imaginary new green energy technologies..."]

* A ''[[The Far Side]]'' cartoon features an [[The Igor|Igor]]-like character walking into a shop selling "unnatural foods".

 

* An episode of ''[[South Park]]'' has an New Age "healer" who buys various trinkets and concoctions from [[Cheech and Chong]] and passes them off as Native American remedies, including [[Squick|"tampons made from the hair of Cherokee."]] Things take a turn for the serious when Kyle starts suffering kidney failure and Mrs. Marsh recommends he sees said healer, who diagnoses his condition as "toxins" that need to be purged. When Stan tries to tell the healer that these treatments aren't working and needs to go to the hospital, he gets labeled a smart-ass and receives a bunk lecture on how Native American remedies are more in tune with nature than Western medicine, despite the fraud healer having no idea how these remedies work in the first place, let alone how to make them. It's not until C&C insist that Kyle needs to get to a hospital ASAP that anybody listens.

** The healer tells Stan that Western medicine is all about making money and not about healing, immediately turning to a customer, "That'll be $200."

 

== [[Truth in Television]]: [[Real Life]] examples that sound like parodies ==

** [[wikipedia:John R. Brinkley|John R. Brinkley]] became rich and infamous by transplanting tissue from goats (mainly testicles or ovaries) into men and women. He initially promoted these procedures as treatments for impotence and infertility, but later claimed that they cured dozens of ailments, ranging from flatulence to dementia.

** [[wikipedia:Serge Voronoff|Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff]], after experimenting with injections of testicular tissue from dogs and guinea pigs, began treating patients by transplanting thyroid glands, testicles, and ovaries from simians such as chimpanzees and baboons.

* Homeopathic remedies claim to work on the principle of [[You Fail Pharmacology Forever|"like cures like"]]. The idea is that an active substance (arsenic, for example) has [[You Fail Physics Forever|"energy"]] that can be transferred to water by shaking a mixture vigorously (but homeopaths say that only they know how to do the proper kind of shaking), and the more times you repeat the mix-and-shake procedure (to the point that you'd be lucky<ref>or, in the case of arsenic, unlucky</ref> to get one molecule of the original substance in a swimming pool) the more powerful the energy gets. And water that's been energized by the arsenic that's been diluted out of it ''cures'' [[Insane Troll Logic|arsenic poisoning and any illness whose symptoms vaguely resemble arsenic poisoning.]]

** The whole deal sounds even less credible when one is told how this system was "discovered" and developed. It started out with a man having the idea of "fighting fire with fire" with his patients. They came in with say, symptom x, he prescribed them something which is supposed to cause symptom x (usually one poison or another—people don't seek medical aid for benevolent symptoms). He began experimenting with different doses of said poison, to find that the less he prescribed, the faster the person recovered, and so he began diluting his "medication" to a point there was little more then simple water left in it. As a side note, any time a homeopathic fan tells you that it's better than "modern Western medicine", point out that it was invented by a German in the 1800s. It tends to blow their minds.

[[Category:Advertising Tropes]]

[[Category:Truth in Television]]