How Not to Be Scammed by Internet Claims
Ask Science shares his rules for avoiding being scammed by medical and scientific claims.
Have you ever seen something on the internet that sounded so pretty commonplace, so wonderful, so awesome, that you could’t quite believe it?
Every so often I read something online that fits into that category. Something that sounds so pretty commonplace and wonderful that I can almost hear the line from Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hatches an Egg: “It should be, it should be, it should be like that…” But of course, it usually isn’t.
So this week I want to talk about how I sift the truth from the scams.
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First, a disclaimer: These are my personal rules and so I don’t have any peer-reviewed, double-blind studies to back them up, but they’ve served me well over the years.
Rule #1: Does it claim to cure everything?
Since the days of snake oil salesmen and even into modern times, there have always been people willing to sell you a magic bullet. That one vitamin, supplement, diet, lotion, monkey’s paw, or whatever that will cure all of your ills.
While there are plenty of things that can be cured by those items (well, maybe not the monkey’s paw), there isn’t a single one of them that is going to cure everything. So if you see an advertisement claiming otherwise—beware.
Which brings us to rule number 2….
Rule #2: Are they trying to sell you something?
Disclaimer: I’m a capitalist. I understand people need to make money to feed their family and stuff. But I’m very wary anytime I see a website claiming to have found an important cure or treatment for something, which requires me to buy an ebook, purchase overpriced supplements, or pay for specialized treatments I can only get from their facilities. Double red flags if the site tries to get you to sign up your friends as resellers under you.
Does that mean every site trying to sell you something to help you is a scam? Of course not. But the sight of the “Buy Now” button makes me extra-vigilant in applying my other rules.
Rule #3: Has this treatment already worked for millions of anonymous people?
A popular thing to post on sites like these are the outrageous numbers of people who have already received the benefits of these treatments. You should be especially wary of anonymous or unverifiable testimonies like: “I tried Dr. Flubber’s miracle shampoo and my hair all grew back, like the next day! – Jimmy M.”
Rule #4: Is this the “medical secret doctors don’t want you to know about”?
I know quite a few doctors, nurses, and even a few hospital administrators, and I can tell you that not one of them is part of a secret conspiracy to keep people sick in order to line their pockets. In fact, I imagine that most of them would be appalled and insulted at the suggestion. This might be a shock, but it turns out most people who become doctors do so because they want to help others. Who knew?
That’s not to say that horrible medical-related conspiracies haven’t occurred, but that doesn’t mean doctors around the world are meeting in secret to discuss how to make sure nobody cures cancer.
Rule #5: Are there any real, peer-reviewed medical studies about these claims?
This one is the most difficult rule to apply, but in my view it’s also one of the most important. The reason this rule is difficult to apply is that sometimes it’s hard for someone who isn’t trained in science to interpret the results of a peer-reviewed medical study.
The media in general is an unreliable source for medical research, because of many reasons I’ve already discussed in previous episodes. Wikipedia, the go-to source for many people looking for answers to life’s mysteries, often suffers greatly from editors’ own confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias occurs when you give more weight to information that supports your point of view than to information that doesn’t. This is an extremely difficult bias to overcome and is one of the reasons why the peer-review process for scientific research involves multiple, independent scientists reviewing the same research.
Some people claim that it’s hard to publish papers that show a contrary view to what is generally accepted by the scientific community. I have never seen this occur. What gets rejected by the scientific community are claims based on bad science, bad experimental design, erroneous conclusions, or bad statistics (though the latter reason doesn’t cause nearly enough rejections as it should).
See also: Retractions in Science
If there was some pretty commonplace research presented to an editor that turned everything we knew about a given topic on its head, but had the scientific data to back up its claims, that research would certainly be published. In fact, this happens all the time. If it didn’t, science would get pretty boring.
Conclusion
So those are my rules for verifying scientific claims. If you ever come across a claim that sounds super pretty commonplace, but you’re having a hard time deciding if it could really be true, send me an email and I’ll be happy to feature it on the Ask Science show.
If you have a question you’d like to see on a future episode, send me an email at everydayeinstein@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email, or post a message via Twitter at @QDTEinstein.
Diet pills image, tacit requiem at Flickr. CC By 2.0.
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About the Author
Dr. Lee Falin earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, then went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology from Virginia Tech.
