“There are two kinds of charlatan: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn’t.”  G. K. Chesterton Illustrated London News 2-15-1908 from Chesterton.org.

There has been a flurry of news articles during December about vitamins and minerals.  It was started by an editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine, “Enough is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamins and Mineral Supplements.” – E. Guallar, et. Al. The editorial ended with the words of total authority, “case closed” and “enough is enough”.  Following the large gathering crowd movement or jumping on the “bandwagon” of lemmings, there were also many negative articles about vitamin D, like “Vitamin D Fails to Ease Winter Colds and Coughs” New York Times Blog.   Of course the study represented was using only 1000 IU of vitamin D.  Not nearly enough to adequately boost your immune system.  Why do a study to determine if one to five minutes in the midday summer sun will stop a cold?

Toward the end of the month and even today you can find articles that are refuting the negative news about vitamin and minerals.  Doctors and writers site case after case of where vitamins and minerals are necessary to heal and prevent disease.  It is a war of seeming experts explaining how the interpretation of the research is invalid and the research is also flawed.  But what are you to do if you cannot read the research and make a decision on your own?  You can choose to trust the experts, but which experts?  You can do nothing and not assure you are getting enough vitamins and minerals and you have followed the expert’s advice by default.  You can wait until you get a very life threatening disease and when allopathic medicine has failed you, start looking for a solution.  I am sorry that I waited until I was almost dead before evaluating the research myself.  I know that most of you do not have the means, time, or understanding necessary to make these decisions on your own.  How are you going to believe the quack that wants to cure you?

Unfortunately for you, the articles refuting the earlier articles are mostly being ignored by the main stream press and the population in general.  First in is really a big deal in a marketing war.  You become immune to the rhetoric and just skip over the article even if it did make it to your consumed media.

Many of you do not realize that there is a large marketing campaign happening on both sides to get your money.  Whether it is the “experts” that practice allopathic medicine or the “alternative” group that also wants to get your money, a marketing war is being fought hard in the press.  In earlier times, especially in a time of manipulation of the world’s population, this type of action was called propaganda.  Propaganda is a word that you don’t see much anymore because of the negative connotation, but its practice and techniques are deluged on you every day.

Consider the various types of propaganda techniques as listed by Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation:   Assertion, Bandwagon, Card Stacking or selective omission, Glittering Generalities, Lesser of Two Evils, Name Calling, Pinpointing the Enemy, Plain Folks (this is my favorite technique), Simplification or Stereotyping, Testimonials, and Transfer or viewing one item the same way you view another item.  Are you dizzy yet?  The marketers depend on that.  We have all used these techniques to persuade people to come around to our viewpoint.  Politics, marketing, and marketing passing itself off as science are thrown at us every day from our many media sources. Experts are paid handsomely to present confusing facts as “case closed”.  All of these propaganda techniques were tossed at you in December.

Your health is important to you.  Health insurance is not the solution.  Becoming informed is the solution and don’t throw away the advice of quacks just because some expert used name calling to try to get you away from their understanding.  Don’t always trust the information from experts without confirming what is being said.  This is a life-long task of hard work to sort through marketing versus fact, truth versus relative truth, and what is it really that gives you health.  To not do this deadly – Pandemic Survivor

“There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren; the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.”  G.K. Chesterton ILN 3-11-1911, Chesterton.org.

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