Here’s a moral claim that should be uncontroversial: it’s wrong to commodify anything where there is insufficient evidence that it actually does what the merchant claims. Whether we call these things supernatural, superstitious, pseudoscientific, wellness, or just woo, there is a reason the term ‘snake-oil salesman’ is fundamentally derogatory. It’s wrong to sell people bullshit.
Yet, despite the intuitive appeal of this moral claim, when you argue that it is very bad that we have normalised the selling of snake oil on countless fronts, you can expect a surprising amount of pushback. Even as the effects of mainstreaming and commodifying woo wreak havoc on America’s federal approach to everything from vaccines to milk pasteurisation, there remains a strong resistance to the idea that it should be illegal to sell a product using claims not supported by sufficient evidence.
So, in the interests of ethical clarity, I want to work through the objections that most frequently arise when you argue against the legalisation of selling snake oil. I’ve divided the arguments up into those meant to defend the selling of products by claiming it actually works, and arguments meant to defend the selling of products irrespective of whether they actually work.
Part 1: Arguments based on the product actually working
These objections attempt to defend snake-oil sales by claiming that the products do, in fact, work – just not in ways mainstream science recognises or can measure.
“Quantum physics proves it works.”
The most direct sorts of arguments in favour of snake oil are that you shouldn’t call it snake oil because cutting-edge science shows that it actually works, or at least provides a mechanism for how it could work. One of the forms of this, if not the most common, is what physicists have come to call “quantum woo” – the misappropriation of quantum mechanical concepts to lend a veneer of scientific legitimacy to pseudoscience.
You’ve likely encountered some version of this: consciousness affects reality at the quantum level, everything is vibration and energy, and the observer effect proves that your thoughts shape the physical world. Therefore, practices dismissed as woo are actually tapping into deep truths about the universe that mainstream science is only beginning to understand. No figure embodies this tendency more than Deepak Chopra, whose books (like Quantum Healing) argue that we can learn to manifest changes in quantum states that in turn impact our health and wellbeing.
Quantum woo fails as an explanatory mechanism for manifestation or any other form of snake oil on at least two points. Firstly, it requires that our minds somehow impact things at the quantum level, and secondly that changes at the quantum level then somehow ‘bubble up’ to produce changes at our level of existence. Both sorts of interaction are incompatible with current research in quantum physics research.
Advocates of quantum woo often point to the observer effect as proof that our minds impact quantum states, but the observer effect only refers to the interaction of measurement devices with quantum systems, not to human consciousness magically altering reality at the quantum level through intention or observation. Even if our minds could impact quantum states, the idea that changes at the quantum level somehow reliably “bubble up” to impact things at our level is also disproven by research on the nature of quantum entanglement, where indeterminacy at the quantum level does not translate into indeterminacy for us medium-sized dry goods.
On top of those theoretical objections, the quantum woo framework has a specific intellectual history that should make us default towards skepticism. As with so many problems I’ve previously covered, from racist pseudohistory to the worst parts of High Weirdness, quantum woo has its roots in the New Thought movement that arose in the 19th century. New Thought is the Western world’s patient zero for all things ‘mind over matter’, as well as a bunch of other loosely related snake oils. It cursed us with concepts of the “Law of Attraction”, which provides the basis for modern manifestation woo through books like Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret.
Long before there was any quantum physics to invoke, Phineas Quimby and other New Thought ‘pioneers’ were already claiming that the mind shapes reality and that we attract our circumstances, including all physical illness or other negative experiences, through mental vibrations.
When quantum mechanics came along, it simply provided a scientific-sounding rebranding of pre-existing beliefs. High Weirdness books like Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters established the template: find superficial linguistic parallels between quantum mechanics and Eastern mysticism, then declare that physics has validated ancient spiritual wisdom.
This history of ideas matters, because it reveals the quantum woo argument as fundamentally post-hoc rationalisation. Proponents aren’t following the evidence from quantum physics to conclusions about healing; they’re starting with conclusions inherited from 19th-century metaphysical movements and retrofitting quantum language onto them. The same beliefs that were once justified by appeals to animal magnetism, vital force, and thought vibration are now justified by appeals to wave function collapse and quantum entanglement. The packaging changes; the product remains the same.
Finally, even if we found that quantum effects were relevant to human biology at the scales that matter for health, this would not validate any particular alternative treatment. Demonstrating that quantum mechanics is weird and counterintuitive does not demonstrate that homeopathy works. The logical gap between ‘reality is stranger than we thought’ and ‘therefore, buy my supplements’ is vast, and quantum woo systematically obscures it.
There are many other forms of pseudoscientific explanations raised in defence of snake oils, often arising from other strands of New Thought, but they all face similar challenges from experts in the sciences they seek to ape. Another extremely popular one is one version of appeals to the placebo effect, where the claim is that the mental power exhibited in the placebo effect can produce objectively better outcomes, even curing illness. These arguments rely on poorly designed studies and misrepresentations of research, as documented extensively by Mike Hall and others.
These methods for defending snake oil are particularly insidious, because they readily exploit public unfamiliarity with the complexities of actual physics and the scientific method to make pseudoscience feel cutting edge. But dressing up 19th-century vitalism in 21st-century science jargon doesn’t make it true. It just makes the deception harder to spot.
“Scientists are unwilling or unable to study everything”
Instead of presenting evidence that science supports a particular snake oil, the epistemic humility gambit attempts to flip the script by positioning skeptics as the arrogant ones for assuming such a thing is necessary or even possible. The central claim is that scientists either can’t effectively study a particular phenomenon – like the mind’s impact on the body – or that they refuse to do so, because of conspiracy or academic taboos. After all, scientific consensus has been wrong before, and we know it’s wrong about some things right now, so who are we to even say whether or not a particular treatment works with enough confidence to regulate it?
Epistemic humility cuts both ways, though. Yes, we should be humble about the limits of current scientific knowledge. But we should also be humble about our ability to identify genuine treatments without rigorous testing. Much of the history of medicine before the scientific method was essentially a long experiment in trusting intuition, authority, and tradition that resulted in centuries of bloodletting, mercury treatments, and radium suppositories. The demand for evidence is not arrogance; it is the hard-won recognition that humans are spectacularly bad at figuring out what works without systematic controls.
If we consider what genuine epistemic humility would mean for policy, one could argue we should simply err on the side of caution and ban the sale of all unproven products and services. We don’t let companies sell cars without rigorous testing, so why give a free pass to other products, especially ones that carry significant risks of harm? Some might see that as overreach, and might object by shifting to one of the arguments for why we shouldn’t see a lack of current scientific evidence as sufficient to restrict a product or service. That said, we should at least be able to restrict the selling of products using efficacy claims that lack sufficient evidential support.
If we want to compromise and require people to loudly proclaim ‘there is no evidence that this product works and we’re not allowed to even imply that it does’ before selling their snake oil, that would still be a vast improvement over the current situation. Once you’ve got there, though, it raises the question what value there is in allowing even that, especially given concerns that individuals will heavily discount disclaimers when they’re desperate for options.
“You’re dismissing indigenous and traditional ways of knowing”
This objection has gained significant traction on the political left in recent years, often framed as a matter of cultural respect, or even anti-colonialism. One popular version of the argument is that Western science is just one way of knowing among many, and that dismissing untested traditional medicine as “woo” perpetuates colonial hierarchies of knowledge. One might even point out that the derogatory “snake oil” originated from con-men co-opting traditional medicines that may actually work, and replacing the ingredients with garbage, and that we shouldn’t hold such things against traditional medicines.
There is a kernel of legitimacy here. Traditional medical systems have sometimes identified genuinely effective treatments that Western medicine later validated – aspirin’s origins in willow bark being the canonical example. And the history of Western society’s dismissal of non-Western practices is indeed central to racialised colonialism.
However, the claim that there are multiple ways of knowing and therefore we should exempt traditional practices from evidential scrutiny does not follow. This argument is itself condescending, as it suggests that traditional practices cannot survive contact with scientific testing. It would be a form of bigotry of low expectations to act as though the best we can do for indigenous knowledge is protect it from evaluation. If a traditional treatment actually works, rigorous study will demonstrate that. If it doesn’t work, hiding that information would harm the very communities whose traditions are being invoked, and commodifying it spreads that harm for profit.
Part 2: Arguments that don’t assume the product works
These objections accept, at least implicitly, that snake-oil products may not deliver on their promises, and instead argue that there are other reasons to permit their sale.
“If it makes people feel better, what’s the harm?”
Some appeals to placebo effects don’t claim the treatment works because of “mind over matter”, rather they acknowledge that an alternative treatment lacks efficacy but that this doesn’t matter as long as people subjectively benefit from them. There’s something to this. Subjective outcomes, in the sense of how a person feels, really do matter, and many things can provide comfort, attention, and a sense of agency that can be hard to come by in medical settings.
However, even if we buy that there are subjective benefits, they come with serious harms. Firstly, there are opportunity costs: people who rely on ineffective treatments may delay seeking effective care until their conditions become harder to treat. This is not hypothetical. Oncologists regularly see patients who tried to treat their cancers with diet, supplements, or prayer, before reluctantly turning to chemotherapy. Research published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that patients who chose alternative medicine instead of conventional cancer treatment had a more than twofold increased risk of death, with breast cancer patients facing a more than fivefold increase in mortality risk.
Secondly, there are direct financial harms. The wellness industry now exceeds $6.3 trillion globally, extracting money from people who can often least afford it, promising solutions to problems that require systemic rather than individual intervention. The person buying mushroom blends to manage their chronic stress might be better served by structural changes to their working conditions, but the supplement industry would prefer they keep buying the mushrooms.
Thirdly, and most philosophically troubling: do we have a right to be deceived into feeling better? I’m reminded of one of my favourite articles by The Onion, Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show. However, while the urge to indulge sometimes is understandable, making it easy for people to habitually purchase self-deception has clearly contributed to a worse epistemic and health climate for all involved.
“Adults should be free to spend their money however they want”
The autonomy objection is typically the next line of defence after attempts to claim the product objectively or subjectively works, and just as with those arguments there’s some bit of truth here. Respecting individual liberty means allowing people to make choices we disagree with, including choices we consider irrational and to some degree self-harming, such as engaging in dangerous sports. If someone wants to spend their money on homeopathy or healing crystals, who are we to stop them?
The problem is that this objection conflates two very different things: the freedom to make choices and the freedom to be deceived. Genuine autonomy requires informed consent, which means having access to accurate information about what you’re buying. When a supplement company claims their product “supports immune health” or “promotes natural detoxification”, they are not facilitating autonomous choice – they are exploiting the gap between what those phrases legally require them to prove (nothing) and what consumers reasonably infer them to mean (that the product does something).
The autonomy objection also tends to assume a model of human cognition that doesn’t match reality. We are not perfectly rational agents calmly weighing evidence before each purchase. We are exhausted, hopeful, sometimes desperate, and subject to a host of cognitive biases that snake-oil merchants have become experts at exploiting.
The same people who would never argue that fraud laws violate autonomy somehow treat medical fraud as a matter of personal choice. This is not respecting autonomy; it is abandoning people to predators while feeling virtuous about it.
“What about religious freedom?”
When the snake oil in question comes wrapped in religious packaging, such as faith healing, fortune telling, or blessed objects, a different set of considerations unfortunately come into play. In many jurisdictions, religious exemptions create carve-outs that allow practices that would otherwise be regulated or prohibited, and that is likely to some extent unavoidable in a free society.
I want to be clear about the limits of my argument here. I am not arguing that religious belief should be illegal, or that churches shouldn’t be allowed to offer prayer. What I am arguing is that the moment someone begins selling a product or service with explicit or implied claims about better outcomes, they should be subject to the same evidential standards as everyone else, regardless of whether those claims are framed in religious terms.
The religious exemption framework will always be a problematic shield for a wide range of harms, but limiting the commodification of snake oil via that exemption is likely to limit the scope of those harms. The prosperity gospel pastor selling miracle cures to vulnerable people he will never meet has more in common with a supplement company than with a local pastor praying over a sick congregant. The commercial intent exacerbates the cost to everyone for allowing any degree of localised autonomy on this front.
“First they came for the homeopaths…”
The slippery slope objection predicts regulatory overreach: once we start banning snake oil, where does it stop? Will vitamins be next? Will we need a prescription to buy herbal tea?
Once more, these concerns are not entirely without merit, as regulatory agencies can indeed overreach, and the line between ‘unproven’ and ‘disproven’ is not always crisp. However, we already regulate claims in other domains. Pharmaceutical companies cannot claim their drugs treat conditions without evidence. Food companies face restrictions on health claims. The supplements industry exists in its current form largely because of specific legislative carve-outs, particularly the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in the US, which were the result of industry lobbying, not some principled commitment to consumer freedom.
The question is not whether we should regulate claims at all, since we already do, but whether the current exemptions for supplements, alternative medicine, and wellness products are justified. I don’t see how they are.
The costs of inaction
What ultimately undermines all these objections is the mounting evidence of real-world harm from our current permissive approach. The wellness-to-conspiracy pipeline has been well documented, and researchers have coined the term “conspirituality” to describe how alternative spiritual beliefs and wellness culture can funnel people into far-right conspiracy theories.
The current US administration’s hostility to basic public health measures didn’t emerge from nowhere. It grew in soil that the alternative health industry has been cultivating for decades. As PBS has reported, more than 420 anti-science bills attacking long-standing public health protections have been introduced in US statehouses this year alone, pushed by people with close ties to the current Health and Human Services Secretary – someone who I first wrote on back when he was a virtual guest of honour at the Better-Way Antivaxxer conference.
We have, as a society, decided that it is acceptable for whole industries to profit from claims they cannot substantiate, often targeted at particularly vulnerable people in the midst of some sort of life crisis. We have allowed “wellness” to become a multi-trillion-dollar sector built on the principle that feelings matter more than actual outcomes. And we have watched as this epistemic rot has spread from the supplement aisle to the halls of government.
The objections I’ve addressed here are not frivolous. They reflect genuine tensions between individual liberty and public protection, between intellectual humility and universal epistemological standards. But none of them, individually or collectively, justifies the status quo.
Selling people things that don’t work, using claims designed to mislead, remains wrong. It’s long past time our laws and norms reflected that basic moral truth.
