Yesterday, while I was in the middle of calling various doctors and juggling appointments around, I got cold-called by a medical scam telemarketer. The timing was pretty great, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to take as much advantage of the opportunity as I wanted.
The caller was advocating marine phytoplankton as, first and foremost, a cure for cancer, followed by a list including, and I quote, “high cholesterol, blood pressure problems, thyroid problems, arthritis, migraines, allergies…the list goes on and on.”
Yes, I’m sure it does. I would love to have had a nice conversation with the lady on the phone, but she clearly had zero idea what she was talking about. She kept to a script, and when I asked questions to clarify — even “what did you just say?” — she appeared incapable of deviating even to repeat herself. The spiel included an offer for a free sample, which I was very tempted to accept, but there was no way I was giving those people my address. So, on the off-chance the calls are monitored in some way, I just calmly explained that the product she was selling is a scam, that there is no such panacea, please remove me from your call list, and so forth. I’m sure it didn’t slow her or any of the other telemarketers down for a moment.
Then I Googled “marine phytoplankton” and wow, what a depressing result. Phytoplankton are actually quite neato and important little plants, which are at the bottom of the marine food chain, but you wouldn’t know it from my search, which as you can see is a cavalcade of quackery. (If you remove the word “marine,” you get a slightly better list; apparently the snake oil is best identified by that modifier but it still turns up on the front page.) I had no idea.
Look! Diatoms!
I don’t really have a point to all this, other than in addition to being skeezed out as usual by snake-oil salespeople, it makes me sad to see something of such genuine scientific coolness co-opted into just another quack remedy.
TAM was so incredible that the skeptic part of my brain overloaded and burnt out. Until it’s recovered I’ll be posting thoughts on the other areas of the blog, like videogames. (I warned you!) I send you off with a little lecture about phytoplankton.
