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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING
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To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (12090)5/5/2002 8:51:59 PM
From: Dayuhan   of 21057
 
The thing that strikes me about pseudoscience is the speed at which it has become a thriving industry. There are a lot of people making a whole lot of money out of blind credulity. People who complain about drug company profits, for example, ought to seriously look at the numbers on the dietary supplements industry. Remember melatonin, widely billed as "nature's sleeping pill"? It became the subject of a huge fad, people were snapping it up off the shelves (at staggering prices) as fast as it could be produced. Of course it turned out not to be natural at all. The producers claimed to be extracting the hormone from the glands of sheep, but a few quick calculations revealed that they'd have had to slaughter every sheep on earth to extract a few month's supply. It was of course being synthetically produced. It was also later revealed that the substance had zero therapeutic benefit (short of placebo effect) and at the dosages being sold, which were orders of magnitude beyond those naturally found in the body, had a constellation of nasty side effects.

Of course the producers dismissed all the evidence as a conspiracy of those nasty profit-oriented drug companies, and went right on raking in the dough.

That's one example. There are thousands of others. Where credulity reigns, people will find ways to profit from it.
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