Bad science

Whatever our political leanings, everyone is basically a socialist when it comes to healthcare: we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions

as George Orwell first noted, the true genius in advertising is to sell you the solution and the problem.

Very little of the curcumin you eat is absorbed. You have to eat a few grams of it to reach significant detectable serum levels, but to get a few grams of curcumin, you’d have to eat 100g of turmeric: and good luck with that.

And a paper currently in press shows that people are more likely to take advice when they have paid for it.

People I know still insist on buying brand-name painkillers. As you can imagine, I’ve spent half my life trying to explain to them why this is a waste of money: but in fact the paradox of Branthwaite and Cooper’s experimental data is that they were right all along. Whatever pharmacology theory tells you, that brand-named version is better, and there’s just no getting away from it.

Every time you get a cold from now on, you’ll be back at your GP, hassling her for antibiotics, and she’ll be saying, ‘Look, I don’t think this is a very good idea,’ but you’ll insist, because they worked last time, and community antibiotic resistance will increase, and ultimately old ladies die of MRSA because of this kind of irrationality, but that’s another story.*

As Voltaire said: ‘The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.’

In terms of basic human biochemistry, detox is a meaningless concept. It doesn’t cleave nature at the joints. There is nothing on the ‘detox system’ in a medical textbook. That burgers and beer can have negative effects on your body is certainly true, for a number of reasons; but the notion that they leave a specific residue, which can be extruded by a specific process, a physiological system called detox, is a marketing invention.

What is the other major ingredient, impressively listed as ‘hydrolysed carbohydrate’? A carbohydrate is a long string of sugar molecules all stuck together. Starch is a carbohydrate, for example, and in your body this is broken down gradually into the individual sugar molecules by your digestive enzymes, so that you can absorb it. The process of breaking down a carbo-hydrate molecule into its individual sugars is called ‘hydrolysis’. So ‘hydrolysed carbohydrate’, as you might have worked out by now, for all that it sounds sciencey, basically means ‘sugar’.

The presentation of these purification diets and rituals has always been a product of their time and place, and now that science is our dominant explanatory framework for the natural and moral world, for right or wrong, it’s natural that we should bolt a bastardised pseudoscientific justification onto our redemption. Like so much of the nonsense in bad science, ‘detox’ pseudoscience isn’t something done to us, by venal and exploitative outsiders: it is a cultural product, a recurring theme, and we do it to ourselves.