A despicable article on Salon, along with its asinine and credulous responses, reminds me again that ‘well’ is quite possibly the most dangerous word in the English language. Medicine belongs to a special category of human sciences in that it is an area of extreme complexity requiring an enormous amount of intellectual investment to understand which everyone nonetheless presumes to hold an opinion on; thankfully, if you observe long enough you learn how to weed out the two more malicious categories of fakers from people who actually know what they’re talking about.

In general, one can divide promoters of pseudomedical woo into two categories - hucksters and dupes. The dupes are, like all dupes, the right mixture of ignorant and arrogant to buy into whatever stupid idea the closest guy with a loud voice is pitching; the hucksters, on the other hand, are experienced frauds whose MO involves obfuscatory language tailored to pitch a useless product. Some hucksters might actually fall into the category of dupes themselves, but - as the Rotten Library observed of Pat Robertson - in general, when they or their loved ones come down with dangerous afflictions, they usually seek out aggressive medical treatment rather than trusting in God, nature, or inscrutable Oriental secrets.

My purpose today is not to take on the hucksters in general; it is to specifically shine a destroying light on the idea of wellness - for in addition to being a stupid replacement for ‘good’ with which you can respond to ‘how are you?’ to indicate you have been to college, ‘well’ is an often-abused power word in pop medicine. In fact, it might just be the most dangerous scientific delusion of our times - there are more audacious ones, after all, but creationism hasn’t exactly killed anyone.

Well, healthy, strong, vital. All synonyms for a poorly-defined state in which the body is capable of taking care of itself, free of blemish and functioning ‘naturally’. Often, wellness is associated with the immune system, which I intend to tackle in a moment. In general, the concept of wellness feeds on a real medical phenomenon to prop up a stupid, threadbare medieval dogma, rather like using the sound of the ocean in a seashell to prove Star Trek was right about teleportation. There are a number of systemic responses to illness or localized trauma, all of which are either psychiatric defense mechanisms designed to force the sufferer into a naturally ideal behavior or direct consequences of systemic exertion. What starts as a reasonable and readily-observable datum - that the creeping crud encourages us to relax, giving the body more energy to handle consequences of disease and forcing us to avoid worsening the affliction with overexertion - is metamorphosed into a categorical imperative without actual evidence, that the body possesses a magical toolbox capable of dealing with any affliction without our interference.

The logic here is similar to observing fatalities drop with the introduction of strict traffic laws and concluding that traffic laws are sufficient to eliminate violent crime.

The idea of wellness is tied to physical vigor in a nebulous fashion - often including nutrition for some inscrutable reason. It is a favorite lie of the woo-hucksters that every illness is somehow connected to our failure to sufficiently nourish ourselves, and further that the medical establishment, out of a crass profit motive, ignores the necessity of nutrition to our well-being. The truth is that with very few exceptions, the global north receives more non-caloric nutrients than it knows what to do with, and additional supplements - almost without fail - wind up in our urine. The few cases where an insufficient supply of some vitamin or nutrient is a real physical problem are easily diagnosed and actually play a major role in general practice medicine - something that the scam artists in the insurance industry have done a great deal to suppress among Americans, often with the direct help of ‘alternative medicine’ propaganda - and anyone fortunate enough to have regular checkups knows that a good number of trivial complaints are actually caused by and resolvable by changes in diet. Of course, to admit that mainstream medicine understands perfectly well when additional nutrient intake is necessary would be to throw a valuable sales tool out the window - which is why naturopaths, even when aware of an actual deficiency in patents, will typically give them useful medicine among a battery of useless crap.

Which brings us to the idea of the placebo, the subject of the asnine Salon article and one of the favored hobby-horses among every kind of anti-medical huckster. The popular misunderstanding of the placebo effect is powerful in Anglophone culture, largely because of the strong influence of religion - a religion which asserts a superagency on our part, a religion in which we are not only in complete control of ourselves but in complete control of our destinies and our world - a comforting dogma for the comforted and an afflicting dogma for the afflicted, but what can you do. The popular misunderstanding is that the placebo effect works by the brain synthesizing any effects that might occur from the treatment it is given - in fact, it is often twisted to suggest that the only significant part of medicine is the brain’s understanding of it.

This hyper-placebo position is patently ridiculous - unconscious patients are successfully medicated all the time; surgical anaesthesia would be impossible if it were true; and many persistent vegitatives rely on regular medical treatment which would be impossible in the absence of intrinsic efficacy - and I doubt that anyone who pushes it actually believes it. If they do, they’re titanically stupid; if they don’t, they believe it to be a useful way of hand-waving away the fact that what they have for sale doesn’t actually do anything. In general, it is often presented part and parcel with a belief in a hypertrophied human brain - and a hypereffective human immune system.

The idea that human beings are inherently capable of fending off illness is ridiculous and insulting, but it is a delusion that has been carefully cultivated by generations of malevolent advertising phenomena; advertising culture has convinced us that food is capable of an intrinsic healthiness or unhealthiness outside of its physical constituents; that the body was designed millions of years ago to hold back on us until given both a compound developed in the 1980s and the packaging developed for it by the same firm; and that we are ultimately responsible for any hardship that befalls us. The immune system needs boosting, and boosting the immune system is always a good idea.

As someone whose immune system attempts to kill him in the presence of legume proteins, I find the idea that handing it more power is an inherently good idea somewhat lacking. And there are other people who would find similar grounds to disagree.

In short, the pat lists of well-marketed medications which, the medical community has disscovered to its fulsome shame, do no more than vaunted naturopathic merchandise do no more to disprove the general efficiency of modern medicine - or the scientific method used in its development that naturopaths so often sneeringly deride - than the Piltdown hoax disproves evolution. The depressing thing is seeing people who have no use for the Puritans’ ridiculous Christ fall for their even more ridiculous catechism, pounding down Ovaltine and wishing away their sinful afflictions.