If You Love Your Dog, Don’t Fall For Alternative Medicine
Avoid fake doctors who try to treat your dog with unproven and unreliable methods
Disclaimer: This is going to be a rant.
As a dog lover, I’m furious right now
I get all kinds of requests to create engaging websites for businesses of different sizes, from lone entrepreneurs to big industry leaders.
Today I received another request for a website advertising alternative medicine for dogs. I can’t turn down too many contracts because it would damage my own business, so I rolled with it.
But my stomach twisted and turned itself through the entire process. The reason? I have to write lies and false promises that I’d never write or promote on my own terms.
Promoting online counseling for dogs that need real diagnosis and treatment. Explaining that a simple saliva check can accurately diagnose any illness your dog might have (hint: it can’t. There’s a reason real veterinarians draw blood or use MRIs at times).
And writing that vaccine shots are the cause of many diseases, but go unnoticed because the time between getting a shot and getting sick is too large, effectively writing the same dumb shit that these anti-vaccine dumbnuts keep yelling.
Yeah, I’m angry. I know.
I can’t stop that website from going online or attracting customers. If I’d turn him down, someone else would simply take the job. I know many of you are smart people and wouldn’t fall for alternative medicine. But I want to write this, so those who would fall for it may take a second to think about it.
If a 40-year-old guy doesn’t want to get his flu shot because he thinks it would melt his brain or anything, I don’t care. I don’t care about that guy.
But I care about dogs. And if you deprive your dog of real treatment because some fuckwit on the net tells you he can heal him by talking nicely, we’re gonna have a problem.
Alternative medicine doesn’t work. Period.
It’s something I always knew but would never publically condemn because people are entitled to their own (stupid) opinion. But now that even dogs aren’t safe from bullshit anymore, I feel like I got to scream this out.
Alternative medicine is utter bullshit. It is untested, unproven, unreliable, and works solely based on the placebo effect (I believe I feel better now) or the natural course of the disease. There is no biological basis.
The client I worked for promotes simple online counseling. He’d talk with you for a few hours about what’s wrong with your dog. Then he’d tell you what your dog suffers from and how you can treat it. For a few hundred dollars.
That’s bullshit times 10!
To make the whole ordeal sound a little more professional, he also accepts saliva samples that would be sent to a laboratory. And in the same sentence he’s promoting how awesome this is, he condemns real veterinarians for not being able to diagnose your dog efficiently enough.
His homepage offers a tab called laboratory and clinic. The problem with this? He has neither! It’s some dude sitting at home, trying to make a buck with your dog’s illness. It’s a private address. No wonder they offer online counseling.
He apparently has developed a new analysis method that’s been proven for more than two decades. Oddly enough, Google has never heard of it before. And he has no real qualifications, certifications, or otherwise can prove that he knows even basic veterinary medicine.
Please be skeptic
I feel bad for agreeing to create this website just to get paid. It feels like I’m selling my soul. But I want to make this as clear as day: Alternative medicine is bullshit. If your dog or any pet for that matter gets sick, they need a real veterinarian.
They need to be qualified. Don’t trust people who have zero provable qualifications in medicine or veterinary medicine. I know it’s a no brainer but if no one would fall for stuff like this, these businesses wouldn’t pay thousands of dollars for an SEO optimized website.
So there must be people who buy into this pseudoscience. And this rant is for them.
Get your dog to a real veterinarian if you love him.
I don’t want to imagine the dogs who suffer from serious diseases being neglected or not getting the right treatment because their owners fell for some self-proclaimed alternative medicine veterinarian.
Local law already dictates that practitioners of alternative medicine have to publicly declare on their website that their methods aren’t scientifically proven and solely rely on personal belief.
But since it’s bad for business to write in big letters “My methods are fake”, people circumvent this by obfuscating the declaration or putting it in a corner where no one is looking. Much like terms and conditions.
It should be a crime
Since alternative medicine has no scientific basis, no proven concepts or methods that are quantifiable and testable, it is dangerous. It’s superficial.
And now that I think of it, alternative medicine should be outlawed entirely.
Unless you have studied medicine (or veterinary medicine in this case) and can prove that you know what you’re doing, you should not ever be allowed to treat anyone.
I’ve turned down other unethical requests in the past, but if I keep doing this, I will sooner or later run out of clients. And if I can’t feed my daughter because I spend the day white-knighting, that’s equally bad.
Hopefully, writing about this does something to limit the damage I feel indirectly responsible for by taking the contract.
The bottom line is, if you love your children or your pets, don’t buy into this huge pile of bullshit regarding alternative medicine. Real doctors may not be able to treat every disease on the planet. But they are hardworking. Fake doctors and fake vets only care about money. They try to sell you snake oil.
If science can’t verify something, it means it doesn’t work.
Alternative medicine has never achieved anything noteworthy. Every single vaccine on the market, every medication, and every modern therapy has been developed by scientific medicine, based on studies, trials, tests, and thorough examinations.
And any form of medicine that tries to get by without these proofs of concept is no medicine at all.
So that’s my rant. I needed to get this out. I hate fake people. I hate fake promises. I hate those who abuse other people’s naivety for personal gains. I hate when capitalism invades critical areas like health or education.
If your dog falls ill, get him to a vet. A real one. Not some fake doc on a website. The same counts for your kids and yourself. If you get sick, listen to doctors, not homeopaths.
