Snake oil hard sells?

Okay, let’s see a few modern day “snake oil salesman” at work via the Internet:

1. A professor of complementary medicine accused Prince Charles and other backers of alternative therapies on Monday of being “snake-oil salesmen”.

A leading professor of complementary medicine accused Britain’s heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles and other backers of alternative therapies on Monday of being “snake-oil salesmen” who promote products with no scientific basis.

Edzard Ernst, who is stepping down from his post as Britain’s only professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University, also said a long-running dispute with the prince about the merits of alternative therapies had cost him his job—a claim Prince Charles’s office denied.

“Almost directly, Prince Charles has managed to interfere in my professional life and almost managed to close my unit,” Ernst told reporters at a briefing.

A spokesperson for Prince Charles told Reuters the royal heir was not involved in the dispute with Ernst and that she would not respond to professor’s comments about snake-oil salesmen.

Ernst’s complementary medicine research unit at Exeter’s Peninsula School of Medicine had been threatened with outright closure, but the university has now offered it a reprieve and says it is seeking a successor to Ernst to lead it.

“It looked as though I had to go, and that was the price for the unit to continue,” Ernst said. “I pay the price gladly as it is a small price to pay for the unit to continue.”

Ernst said that during his 18 years of researching the efficacy of hundreds of different types of alternative medicine—from acupuncture, to herbal remedies, to homeopathy and chiropractic therapy—he has found that “snake-oil salesmen and pseudo-science are ubiquitous and dangerous”.

Asked whether he included Prince Charles in that category, he said, “yes”.

- Prince Charles a 'snake-oil salesman'? MG.co.za, July 26, 2011.

2. Last week we published a post, “D.I.Y. Music - When Artists Become The Product” by William Gruger, first posted at Hypebot. The post questioned the value of the growing “online industry dedicated to earning money and exposure”. Tunecore CEO Jeff Price recently responded:

The challenge with articles like this is they imply some sort of “magic wand” which, if waved, allows musicians to have instant fame and success. This is just not the case.

The secret to success for a musician is in the art itself. If a snake oil salesman comes asking for money, promising, “Kid, I’m gonna make you a star”–it’s most likely utter bull. A case in point: 98% of what the major labels released and promoted failed. They spent billions of dollars over the years pushing music they hoped would cause reaction, and 98% of the time they failed and the artists still had to give up their rights ending up worse than when they started.

Music needs to cause reaction. In other words, the thing that propelled Nirvana to superstardom was Nirvana’s music. If people didn’t react to the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it wouldn’t have mattered how often they heard the song or seen the video: it was the song itself that caused the fame. Music needs to cause reaction. In other words, the thing that propelled Nirvana to superstardom was Nirvana’s music. If people didn’t react to the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it wouldn’t have mattered how often they heard the song or seen the video: it was the song itself that caused the fame.

- Tunecore CEO Jeff Price Responds: “When Artists Become The Product”, SoundsLikeBranding.com, April 19th, 2011.

3. To the Editor: President Obama gives snake oil sales new meaning. When he talks about “audacity” he means that he can sell anything regardless of how illogical it is.

For example, Obama claimed in his acceptance speech that he would “use the money we’re no longer spending on war to pay down our debt and put more people back to work rebuilding roads and bridges; schools and runways.”

The statement is utter nonsense unless Obama knows nothing about accounting or he is deliberately attempting to mislead the American people.

Mr. President, we are running $1 trillion annual deficients which means we are borrowing the money for war. Therefore, you can't borrow money to pay down the deficient, it is still debt! His approach would be like borrowing from one credit card to make the payment on another – it’s still debt. Only to a snake oil salesman would this make sense, or a president who deliberately tries deceives us with his rhetoric.

- LETTER: Snake oil president, MorningJournal.com, September 15, 2012.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者张欣 中国日报网英语点津 编辑：祝兴媛）