unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [62]
Take, for example, the growth hormone scams that litter the Internet. Perhaps you have received an e-mail message like one sent in 2005 that touted a dietary supplement, HGH 5000, claiming it could “Reduce Body Fat and Build Lean Muscle WITHOUT EXERCISE.” Skeptical, you want to dig for the facts about this seemingly miraculous product. How would you do that? What questions would you ask? Typing “HGH” into an Internet search engine would be the first step, and that would bring up scores of websites, some of which claim to be “buyer’s guides” or “consumer reviews” giving out unbiased information about this product. Some quote medical doctors praising the “clinically proven” benefits of HGH, and many cite an article in The New England Journal of Medicine as proof. All this sounds pretty good—until you start asking questions.
• What are they selling? Scroll down the page on any of these pro-HGH sites and you quickly find they are actually just online stores selling an expensive product. (HGH typically costs $30–$60 or so for a one-month supply.) You can order the “recommended” product directly. That should be a tip-off that the site’s information is biased. After all, you wouldn’t expect a political candidate’s site to give you a fair account of the opponent’s virtues. Websites that are selling something, whether it’s a product, a candidate, or a public policy, are necessarily one-sided at best, and often downright misleading.
• What’s their reputation? At the Federal Trade Commission’s website, we find a “consumer alert” warning us about HGH products. It says that while there “may” be some benefits from real, prescription-only human growth hormone, “FTC staff has seen no reliable evidence to support the claim that these ‘wannabe’ products [advertised on the Internet] have the same effect as prescription HGH.” The FTC is a federal agency with a good reputation for protecting consumers from false advertising, and so we should trust this mild warning much more than the sites that stand to profit from selling us this product. And the FTC is being bureaucratically cautious. Search a bit more and you may find the independent website Quackwatch, one of our favorites, which tells us that the thousands of physicians marketing themselves as “anti-aging specialists” are really practicing an unrecognized specialty, that shots of real HGH for normal people “appear to be a very poor investment,” and that the products being sold without prescription are outright fakes. We trust Quackwatch because it has been working to expose various medical frauds since 1969 (before there were even websites) and was listed by The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998 as one of nine sites providing “reliable health information and resources.” With a reputation like that, we’d accept anything Quackwatch says over the word of anybody trying to sell us a modern Fountain of Youth.
• Can I verify? Look for footnotes and links to original source material. These allow you to “drill down” to find out more and to verify claims for yourself. Huckster websites tend to make claims that the reader can’t check independently. They refer vaguely to “studies,” without saying who published them or how they were conducted, and they provide “testimonials” by unnamed persons who can’t be contacted. Politicians likewise love to cite “studies” to prove their points, but a closer look often shows that the studies don’t really provide the support claimed, or that they come from a hopelessly biased source. HGH provides a perfect example of why one should verify important claims at their source. The product’s hucksters cite a 1990 article in