Last year, a psychiatrist consulted me as a patient and brought some promotional material about Goji juice. He said this was a marvelous nutritional supplement and suggested I sell it in the office. As a distributor, he would get a percentage.
I read through the handsome brochures he left and listened to the accompanying CD. This presented a dozen testimonials by chiropractors, physicians, and naturopaths, all ascribing an impressive array of health benefits to ingesting the juice of the Goji berry. These included a slowing of the aging process, better sleep, better sexual function and mood, improved blood pressure and sugar, more mobility and clarity of thought, and a stronger immune system with fewer colds. Other benefits included help with allergies, psoriasis, back problems, ADHD, Parkinson's disease, and restless legs syndrome.
In addition, the speakers reported cases of amazing regression of metastatic prostate and breast cancers, and disappearance of suicidal depression, sometimes in a matter of days.
It would be easy to be cynical about all this and to see it as just another link in the grand tradition of mountebanks and quacks, the greedy exploiting the gullible. Cynicism is too easy, though. It addresses only the question of why people want to sell Goji juice.
But why do people want to buy it? Even the best sales pitch won't work on people who don't believe in what you're selling. Do people really want to believe that one product can cure so many unrelated conditions, not to mention reverse mortal diseases in no time? It appears that they do.
Analysis of the Goji sales approach shows several elements:
▸ Scientific credentials. All the speakers on the CD start by announcing their field of expertise: chiropractic, medical, hard science, nutrition. Then they list their degrees: BAs in biology and nutrition, PhDs in biochemistry, MDs, diplomas in chiropractic or naturopathy. Their educational institutions range from regional schools you never heard of in the Midwest and Queensland, Australia, to esteemed institutions like Sweden's Karolinska Institute and Harvard Medical School.
▸ Scientific trappings. Several start by saying how, as men and women of science, they were skeptical at first that Goji could be really all that good. Many say they were impressed by the many articles ("more than 50") in standard medical and scientific journals they found in PubMed searches and the like. (My own PubMed search yields 57 references from Japan, most by K. Goji, others by J. Goji, and a few by their less prolific namesakes A., H., N., and T.) Several Goji testimonials include long, scientific words, like "complex polysaccharides."
▸ Ancient wisdom. Supplementing this patina of science are invocations of ancient tradition: Goji "has long been used in the Asian highlands," may explain the storied "longevity in the Far East," and reflects "thousands of years of ancient traditions of Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine."
So this is how it is: If experts with relevant-sounding credentials use plausible words, many people are prepared to at least consider that these authorities can give not just partial answers to small questions but comprehensive ones to large questions, indeed possibly to everything.
This dynamic is not limited to exotic Asian berries with silly-sounding names. Not long ago, a friend showed me a best seller by a physician on wrinkles, specifically how to prevent and get rid of them. I read it and wondered, Would anybody be prepared to accept that a single chemical, α-lipoic acid, could solve and reverse aging practically all by itself, even if several literature references say it's useful? Could anyone think that he can turn his life around in 6 weeks by eating salmon? Apparently, yes.
Closer to home, would anyone think that a cleanser or moisturizer is superior and capable of heaven knows what because a doctor's name is on the label? I guess so.
There were several comments among the Goji testimonials I found almost touching. One called Goji an "elixir for the ages." Another said he was sure that Goji would have a "greater impact on world health" than anything else he could think of. And most poignant of all, the man who said, "I have finally found the answer. The answer is Goji."
It's easy to mock this kind of thing, but the impulse underlying it is profound and pervasive. Life presents many problems, some complex and insoluble. That we all know this doesn't stop many of us from believing, or being prepared to believe, that someone, somewhere, has The Answer. Who can have anything but sympathy for those of our patients who think that, as relevant experts, we actually have it?