Marketing Alternative Medicine

"Choice is always yours" by Bindaas Madhavi/CC-by-nc-nd via Flickr

From Steven Novella’s excellent post, “Common CAM Media Myths” at Neurologica Blog:

“One approach to marketing is not to market the product but to market something intangible – you’re not selling a car, you’re selling excitement or prestige, or even better – sex. CAM marketing often does not market the treatment itself – because the treatments are implausible and ineffective – they just don’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. So instead they market spirituality, control, and empowerment. And the people who want those things, buy it.

Dr. Novella is spot-on.

If there is a common theme voiced by proponents of alternative medicine, it’s the notion of “empowerment.”  How do marketers of alt-med capitalize on it?

The first order of business is to get people to reject “conventional” medicine (the competition). To do this, marketers play on several common themes that are likely to appeal to their target group:

• Mistrust of government & corporations (free yourself from greedy Big Pharma and its government puppets);
• Questioning “authority” (doctors aren’t gods; science doesn’t know everything);
• A preference for the “natural” over the “unnatural” (appeal to nature fallacy).

They then set up a classic “us/them” conflict by painting followers of “conventional” medicine as dupes who are too stupid or lazy to do the “research” that would lead them to enlightenment  (“Educate yourself!” )

Finally, they set up the target as an enlightened “elite,” who are persecuted by dominant forces (“get the information THEY don’t want you to know about!”)

By rejecting “conventional” medicine, alt-med devotees are meant to feel empowered by their “special” knowledge, intellectually superior to others based on an inability to be fooled by those who would force them to accept the conventional, and morally superior to those who support the production and use of “unnatural” products.

The problem is not that alt-med devotees are any stupider than the rest of us; it is that they are exactly as stupid as the rest of us. They are subject to the same psychological manipulation as everyone else, and, like other marketers, sellers of alt-med are aware of the particular biases and weaknesses of their target audience.