Tough Pill To Swallow

There are few feelings in life quite as unnerving as the vibe you get when you start to suspect you are being cheated. I think we all know the feeling - you think you got the deal of a lifetime but then something happens to change your mind and suddenly you can't shake the feeling that you are getting the raw end of a deal or the person you are dealing with is not totally on the up-and-up. Now you start to rethink every encounter with that person or company and you walk around waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is a terrible way to go through the day. In fact, I can only think of one worse feeling and that is the day when all those feelings are confirmed and you find out for sure that you were, in fact, being played for a fool. Then your days are spent contemplating how you could be such an idiot and let this happen in the first place. But all you can really do is control the damage and hope you didn't reveal to too many people just what a sucker you can be. If you are currently walking around in either of these moods, I have good news for you - there are always bigger fools to be had and this week we learned about two groups which have the distinction of not only being suckers, they were loud and sanctimonious to everyone who didn't want to be part of it. The other day the FDA released a lengthy report containing two things which I found interesting. The first is the news antibacterial soap no better for you than regular soap and water and the second is that multivitamins are damn near useless. It appears Christmas has come early for the people who are fans of schadenfreude.

To be honest, I am not totally surprised by the news that antibacterial lotions are no better or worse than regular soap because we got along doing just fine with regular soap for a couple thousand years. I wasn't even all that surprised by this study also revealing that antibacterial lotions are actually worse for you than the germs you are killing because frequent applications eventually start to damage your skin. I mean, all you have to do is think it through - antibacterial lotions are not found in nature which means they have to be made in a lab somewhere and that means creating the perfect mixture of chemicals and chemicals, even the ones intended to help you out, are going to mess you up if you lay them on too heavy. Just because the product is designed to help that doesn't mean you should take a bath in it, which is the whole issue with me. For the last couple of years it seemed as though every place I went people had started replacing good old fashioned soap with antibacterial foam, as though it was the only product anyone should ever use. Over the summer I was on the golf course and got caught on the tee with a gentleman and his son and the kid needed a band-aid for a small cut on his arm. I happen to have one but I didn't have any antibacterial lotion to go with it and this father opted to let his kid continue to bleed rather than apply a band-aid without the healing powers of Purell. At the time I thought it made sense because they didn't know me and didn't know how long the band-aids had been in my golf bag but still thought it was a tad over-cautious. Thinking about that dad today I can't help but smirk.

Still, I am willing to give the Purell police a pass simply because they did have either their or their children's best interest in mind and I wouldn't expect anything less from anyone in this world. I have far less sympathy for the multivitamin hawkers simply because every inquiry regarding what multivitamin I took was met with a lengthy lecture once they found out I don't take any of them. At my gym there is a large poster telling you just what multivitamin you should be taking and when I go in tomorrow I will have to fight the urge to write some kind of smart-ass comment on there somewhere. Again, if you stop and think about it, the idea was flawed from the very start. I mean, it's called a multivitamin because it contains small amounts of many kinds of vitamins, so of course those minuscule amounts wouldn't be enough to meet a doctor's recommended daily dosage. Have you ever seen the size of your standard one-supplement pill? (It should be noted that if you take a vitamin supplement meant to replace just one deficiency the FDA found that those are still effective.) Doing the math, a pill which claimed to combine all the items into one bottle should have been bigger than my fist. Clearly, what this all boils down to is showing the powers of presentation. These products are no different from the "magic elixirs" that used to be sold by scam artists out of the back of wagons at state fairs. Yet, they became such staples of our daily lives because the companies behind them hired really smart marketing firms to get people in lab coats to say these things were good for us and then made convincing TV commercials. That was all it took for these two products to become multi-billion dollar companies. There is a store called Vitamin World and it does very well. They have to be shaking in their boots today.

Again, normally I wouldn't take any great pleasure in knowing that millions of people out there needlessly spent their money on this stuff, only there have been too many times when I was made to feel like the fool because I refused to fall in line with them. That is why today I can't help feel a sense of smug satisfaction in thinking about that person in your office who practically coat themselves in a protective layer of lotion during cold and flu season and shoots you a dirty look for refusing to do the same. The only thing stopping me from getting too smug is that at some point we all fall for this kind of thing. How many times has some product been touted as a miracle cure for everything which ails us, only for it to be discovered a short time later that it really gave you a disease worse than the one it was trying to protect you from? If anything, the fact multivitamins don't appear to do anything - good or bad - should probably be considered a positive outcome. The far more dangerous news is in regards to the lotions but I don't expect that stigma to hang around too long. I am sure it will follow the same cycle it always done - the news tells us something is good for us, the news tells us that thing which was good for us is now very, very bad for us and finally the news tells us that thing is ok as long as we don't go crazy using it. I just wish that we would remember this pattern the next time some miracle product comes on the shelves but I know we won't. All I can really hope for is that I am not one of the people who falls too hard for the hype because it would not be fun to sit through an entire day of people telling me they told me so.