The Problem With Snake Oil Salesmen

 

I was talking with someone in a mental wellness program I'm in and I mentioned how for fun I was trying lots of new things that are supposed to help with mental wellness but had run across some wild claims the felt like they were just mudding the waters and had the potential to cause health misinformation to propagate. For example some music I was listening to said that music at 285 HZ can heal organs and 528 HZ can repair DNA. 

Now I can accept that certain frequencies can help regulate your breathing or heart rate, can make you feel calm, and can help you focus or refocus in such a way that you are better able to handle stress. I also accept that stress can cause all sorts of damage in the long term and if you are better able to manage your stress you may find you feel better and your body works better than before. 

BUT your DNA is not going to be rewritten (sorry neither will you gain superpowers nor will you change your genetic makeup) and listening to music is not going to heal any organs. For example I know people with congestive heart failure and diabetes and listening to all the 285 HZ music out there is not going to suddenly fix their heart or make their bodies produce insulin. 

And this over promising of benefits is not isolated to this particular YouTube video for example over the years I have seen many superfoods come and go which were not shared as simply a good way to get x or y vitamin or a good source of omegas but instead in terms of something that pretty much would cure every ill from cancer to male patterned baldness. Unless you have low levels of a particular nutrient no one really needs to take say cinnamon in pill form. 

The problem is this all feels like snake oil salesmen which seems like a disservice to us all. There is a lot of good that comes from yoga, calming music, mediation, visualization, journaling, drinking a nice up of tea, ... and some of these benefits boil down to the hard to quantify "it just makes you feel better and calmer" but when they make false scientific claims such as rewriting DNA they just make it harder for people to know what health sources to trust which can lead to problems such as anti-vaxers whose choices do not simply affect themselves but their whole neighborhoods. And this riles up the biology degree in me :)

So in the end try these practices as ways to spend time with yourself and be your own best friend, as a way to be more mindful and centered in your life, as a way to stretch yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually, or simply because it is something fun to do with friends. But not because someone has come up with some wild pseudoscientific claims.