werner@aecom.UUCP (Craig Werner) (08/09/85)
I recently came up with the following hypothesis to explain the appeal of nonconventional treatments. Following President Reagan's surgery, the doctor's announced that based on the grade of the tumor, the president "has a greater than 50% chance of being tumor free." Now, what kind of a guarantee is that. A person could take the converse and say that the President has an up to 50% chance of recurrence. On the other hand, if you went to the Caribean for a quack therapy, they would guarantee that you would be cured 100%, even if they were lying through the teeth. And if you have enough chutzpah to die anyway, they'd claim to your next-of-kin that you didn't follow the therapy correctly. It's the doctor's job to give the bad news with the good, while the quacks only give the good, and they package it so well, that it does become irresistable. I admit, that I would have really liked Laetrile, "the most thoroughly studied failure in the history of medicine," to work -- it supporter's claims were that irresistable. -- Craig Werner !philabs!aecom!werner "The world is just a straight man for you sometimes"