Published 11-25-08
Submitted by CSRwire's Video, Commentary and Research
What would you if you woke up one day and someone had proven that the product you manufacture or market or sell just doesn't work. That's roughly what happened recently to people who market remedies for Alzheimer's Disease based on the popular herbal ingredient ginkgo biloba.
Here's the story, courtesy of the Sacremento Bee: "UC Davis researcher finds no effect from ginkgo biloba."
The world is a complicated place, and the effects of many products is hard to evaluate -- hard for consumers and sometimes even hard for manufacturers. I suppose we could think of several epistemic categories:
On the other hand, I'm guessing that many buyers and sellers of herbal remedies would reject the scientific - some would say scientistic - framework that allows the researchers who conducted the study referred to above to say, with such certainty, that ginkgo biloba just doesn't work. Science, they might say, has its limits. There are ways of moving through life other than living by the edicts of scientists. Fair enough. But as a society, we also want to have some reasonable assurance that companies selling products (in this case, herbal products) aren't pulling a fast one, taking advantage of naive, sometimes-uncritical consumers. And the only way to do that is to hold them to standards such as requiring commercial claims to be capable of being evaluated in publicly-accessible ways. Scientific methods fit the bill. Scientists never say, "I just know this...so trust me." They say "here's the evidence, here's how I got it, and here's how you can check my work."
Any product that could be tested that way should be tested that way. And any product that fails the test, probably shouldn't be sold.
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