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Snake
SFN Addict
USA
2511 Posts |
 Posted - 09/20/2005 : 03:06:36
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I searched for anything related to this subject, didn't find anything so if it's already posted forgive me.
I have a question.... My brother is at it again, or should I say, his wacky girlfriend, who believe in past lives amoung other things.
I would like to know why an otherwise intelligent, I think, person with an IQ of over 150 believes in this crap without checking if it's true or not. My brother lets his friend push this nonsense on him and I can't figure out why. I'd like to tell him it's stupid but he won't listen. She's one of the many who just bought this guys book. WHY?
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05252/568248.stm
This website should explain what I'm talking about.
It starts out:
Against odds, Kevin Trudeau still king of late-night infomercial pitchmen
Neither jail nor fines nor discredited products can stop earnest-faced salesman
Friday, September 09, 2005
By Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
In the land of late-night infomercial pitchmen, full of colorful hucksters and muscle-bound workout gurus, Kevin Trudeau is, against odds, still the king.
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 09/20/2005 : 04:35:02 [Permalink]
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quote:
"I'm called a fraud, a charlatan," he said. If he's the fraud, and drug companies are the upstanding citizens, then why is drug giant Merck & Co. the one on the hook for $253 million, following a civil trial surrounding the death of a man taking Vioxx, the painkilling arthritis drug? "They're the ones who murdered 150,000 people, not me," he said, overestimating the deaths, but illustrating his point nevertheless.
Illustrating the point my ass! The deaths Trudeau is responsible for never make the news because they have mostly died from treatable conditions that they refused medical attention for. This sleezy, little quack is no better than Benny Hinn or any other of the 'faith'-healers.
Snake, intelligence alone does not make one immune from gullibility. MDs, for example, often fall for investment scams.
quote:
I would like to know why an otherwise intelligent, I think, person with an IQ of over 150 believes in this crap without checking if it's true or not.
You yourself have pointed out both the problem and it's solution. They never researched the claims, but should before putting their hard-earned money down.
Ask your friends if they know of any documented cases of any sort, that these 'miracle' cures can be directly attributed to.
It is entirely true that the major drug companies are greedy for all the cash they can pry out of the public by any means possible, but that only shows them to be meeting the norm amongst all big corporations.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 09/22/2005 : 15:31:08 [Permalink]
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Trudeau is a whack, a liar, and convicted criminal. He's just out for your $$.
His newest book consists of nothing but a bunch of teases that direct you to his website where, of course, you have to pay yet more $$ to get access to his actual "cures".
The guy is hysterically insane.
His legal troubles of the past stem from claiming that "coral calcium" cures cancer. He endlessly repeates this nonsense even on his newest infomercial, just being carefull to not say the words "coral calcium cures cancer" in the same sentence.
He bases that claim off a study that showed cancer cells, in vitro (i.e. cell cultures) were killed by altering the pH of their environment.
Therefore, as calcium carbonate can alter pH in a beaker of acid, he assumes that ingesting it will "cure" cancer.
How he gets around the fact that if the pH of the human body moves outside the 7.35-7.45 range (a very narrow pH range) that not only will the cancer cells die.... but so will you. I doubt it is possible to actually ingest enough coral calcium to singificantly alter your pH anyway, you would probably poison yourself with it (from the calcium) long before it changed your pH.
But to answer the OP question, Who knows why otherwise intelligent people fall for this shit? Desperation? I dunno.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Randy
SFN Regular
USA
1990 Posts |
Posted - 09/22/2005 : 16:09:30 [Permalink]
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Here's a Quackwatch search on his slinky ass....
http://www.quackwatch.org/search/webglimpse.cgi?ID=1&query=Kevin+Trudeau |
"We are all connected; to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the rest of the universe atomically."
"So you're made of detritus [from exploded stars]. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?"
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson |
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Snake
SFN Addict
USA
2511 Posts |
Posted - 09/24/2005 : 01:54:31 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Randy
Here's a Quackwatch search on his slinky ass....
http://www.quackwatch.org/search/webglimpse.cgi?ID=1&query=Kevin+Trudeau
Thanks, I'm going to send that site to my brother. What good it will do, who know!
Thanks for the replies, guess I knew the answer, just so upset that so many can fall for that.
Filthy, as far as drug co. making money. They go to a lot of expense to try to make things safe, at least they try to follow the FDA rules. And they pay for mistakes, real or imagined (by the public). Unlike the real con artists who just sell anything they can without any ethics. |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 09/24/2005 : 03:38:11 [Permalink]
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quote:
Filthy, as far as drug co. making money. They go to a lot of expense to try to make things safe, at least they try to follow the FDA rules. And they pay for mistakes, real or imagined (by the public). Unlike the real con artists who just sell anything they can without any ethics.
True as far as it goes. The difference is that they are under some stringent regulations that don't apply to the puveyors of crap, but should.
But the bottom line is: don't get sick in the US you are not well insured. It wasn't so long ago that the companies fought against elderly people getting less expensive, perscription drugs, even their own brand names, from Canada. If I recall right, they won.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Randy
SFN Regular
USA
1990 Posts |
Posted - 09/29/2005 : 14:30:44 [Permalink]
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If anyone else has noticed on some programs, Trudeau actually had none other than Tammy Faye Bakker as his couch sittin' side-kick. Two peas in a pod.
It was just too creepy to watch...him spewing his line of b.s. with beady eyes rolling around, along with Tammy's gloppy mascara'ed eyelashes flopping in the wind. It's like a circus side show. |
"We are all connected; to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the rest of the universe atomically."
"So you're made of detritus [from exploded stars]. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?"
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson |
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ronnywhite
SFN Regular
501 Posts |
Posted - 09/29/2005 : 14:56:53 [Permalink]
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| I ran into a guy a few years ago who told me he was in federal prison with Trudeau (the guy I spoke with was a pilot, who did a stretch for drug smuggling.) I asked what Trudeau was in for, and he replied "Some kind of fraud" and I laughed. I knew who he was talking about because I've seen this guy pushing everything under the Sun for years on those infomercials... I thought it was kind of comical because he always had that naive, honest, nice-guy look and always seemed so intensely interested and impressed by what every snakeoil con artist he "interviewed" had to say. I saw he was pushing a book last night; I think it had to do with holistic cures baloney or something (not even a minute passed, and I'd heard him say he had a cure for "everything"... I think that's the word he used.) Yea, right... enough. |
Ron White |
| Edited by - ronnywhite on 09/29/2005 14:57:27 |
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beskeptigal
SFN Die Hard
USA
3834 Posts |
Posted - 10/22/2005 : 11:59:07 [Permalink]
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| The sad part of this story is this guy pulls in well over a MILLION A WEEK!!! He was interviewed by Paula Zahn on CNN. Apparently CNN is reporting the infomercials cost a million a week and the guy is making huge profits. Simply unbelievable. |
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beskeptigal
SFN Die Hard
USA
3834 Posts |
Posted - 11/06/2005 : 00:23:39 [Permalink]
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| Wow, just after I was talking about this guy with some fire fighters I was giving flu shots to, one of the Medics came in and said he had bought Trudeau's book. It's worse than you can imagine. First they try to sell you other stuff when you go to order the book. Finally he got past that hard sales pitch and ordered the book. When it arrived he went right to the 'cures' chapter and guess what? It says due to some legal BS Trudeau can't publish the 'cures' but if you pay for a subscription to his website, he will reveal them there. Unbelievable! |
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ronnywhite
SFN Regular
501 Posts |
Posted - 11/06/2005 : 02:28:45 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by beskeptigal
... Unbelievable!
I might say "disgusting" or "nauseating"... but that, too. Common sense makes that number seem hard to believe- that's a lot of sales. Whatever the actual numbers are, without dispute he's discovered a novel niche, and he must be effective. All of that TV time isn't cheap, and he really is rather a "one-of-a-kind"... his style of selling is unique, and clearly, it works.
There are many good things about free market capitalism and media freedoms, but he demonstrates the negative side. From the points of view of free market economists, guys like him aren't really considered a "negative," either, possibly other than through the indirect harm they cause to society when all of the individual harms are summed... guys like Trudeau help to create jobs, make cash flow, and yield tax revenue for government... meaning, if you're not on the right side of the flow, well, "That's the way the mop flops." Message in this to me is- if one understands that their money is their sweat, labor, and most valuable of all- their time... they should beware. In the big picture, the system really doesn't care if the money goes towards someone's kid's education, or Trudeau's Vegas weekend. That's up to us. |
Ron White |
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Trish
SFN Addict
USA
2102 Posts |
Posted - 11/06/2005 : 10:03:43 [Permalink]
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quote:
There are many good things about free market capitalism and media freedoms, but he demonstrates the negative side. From the points of view of free market economists, guys like him aren't really considered a "negative," either, possibly other than through the indirect harm they cause to society when all of the individual harms are summed... guys like Trudeau help to create jobs, make cash flow, and yield tax revenue for government... meaning, if you're not on the right side of the flow, well, "That's the way the mop flops." Message in this to me is- if one understands that their money is their sweat, labor, and most valuable of all- their time... they should beware. In the big picture, the system really doesn't care if the money goes towards someone's kid's education, or Trudeau's Vegas weekend. That's up to us.
While I agree with you, wish there were an organization with the funds available to give the 1/2 hour infomercial on why these guys are quacks. I've found a disturbing number of people that don't watch PBS, so they can't be counted. Unfortunately most individuals don't know enough about the scam to recognize it as a scam. Like that infomercial I caught a few nights ago on colonics. You just have to take this little pill full of herbs to get the benefits of a clean intestinal tract. Their 'Dr.' sits there nodding her head and gasping as if a medical professional (which is the impression) is unware of what the digestive tract entails. |
...no one has ever found a 4.5 billion year old stone artifact (at the right geological stratum) with the words "Made by God."
No Sense of Obligation by Matt Young
"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying and vile!"
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
They (Women Marines) don't have a nickname, and they don't need one. They get their basic training in a Marine atmosphere, at a Marine Post. They inherit the traditions of the Marines. They are Marines.
LtGen Thomas Holcomb, USMC
Commandant of the Marine Corps, 1943
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
Posted - 11/06/2005 : 10:41:21 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Trish
quote:
There are many good things about free market capitalism and media freedoms, but he demonstrates the negative side. From the points of view of free market economists, guys like him aren't really considered a "negative," either, possibly other than through the indirect harm they cause to society when all of the individual harms are summed... guys like Trudeau help to create jobs, make cash flow, and yield tax revenue for government... meaning, if you're not on the right side of the flow, well, "That's the way the mop flops." Message in this to me is- if one understands that their money is their sweat, labor, and most valuable of all- their time... they should beware. In the big picture, the system really doesn't care if the money goes towards someone's kid's education, or Trudeau's Vegas weekend. That's up to us.
While I agree with you, wish there were an organization with the funds available to give the 1/2 hour infomercial on why these guys are quacks. I've found a disturbing number of people that don't watch PBS, so they can't be counted. Unfortunately most individuals don't know enough about the scam to recognize it as a scam. Like that infomercial I caught a few nights ago on colonics. You just have to take this little pill full of herbs to get the benefits of a clean intestinal tract. Their 'Dr.' sits there nodding her head and gasping as if a medical professional (which is the impression) is unware of what the digestive tract entails.
You know, along those lines, I have often given thought to buying space at a New Age Expo for a skeptics booth. It could be called something like “The Scientific Evidence For Alternative Curatives” or something ambiguous like that. Basicly we would explain to all who will listen why everyone else at the expo is selling bullshit… |
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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ronnywhite
SFN Regular
501 Posts |
Posted - 11/08/2005 : 23:54:04 [Permalink]
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I really like that idea... it would be especially cool if a list of occupiers of snake-oil sales booths, and speakers/seminars promoting nonsense were attainable ahead of time so as to be well-prepared with literature handouts! Of course, I wouldn't expect such a presence to be enthusiastically greeted, but that's OK. My own experience speaking with a few people who were "into" that kind of thing suggested to me that many are intelligent and informed enough to understand that evidence and logic stand against them, but they want to believe... it's an "emotional thing." Can't reason it away... but it would be fun to try, anyway. Maybe draw people to the booth with free ginseng donuts and herbal teas. Ha ha!
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Ron White |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
Posted - 11/10/2005 : 19:50:30 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.
But wait, there's more!
Wow! Kevin Trudeau is a full-blown sociopath... |
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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