Quackery

If you' judge almost everything in your head without investigation, you're probably a member of the "Quackery Club," where the meetings are far from ducky and leave you with few workable answers.

Grasshopper Notes are the writings from America's Best Known Hypnotherapist John Morgan. His podcasts contain his most responded to essays and blog posts from the past two decades. 

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Transcript

Quackery

I was watching the French Open Tennis Championship yesterday and one of the announcers was commenting that one of the player’s (Novak Djokovic) had a spartan diet and pointed out that ex football great Tom Brady, who was in the crowd, also followed a restricted diet. Then he added that some of their dieting practices bordered on quackery.

I thought The Grasshopper was going to hop into the announcer’s booth and choke the announcer, but stifled himself and offered me this: If something’s working for you, it’s not quackery.

At one time, chiropractic was deemed quackery, mainly by the medical community until people started getting results that their medical doctors couldn’t provide.

Back in the 80s I worked with a woman who stuttered. She had  gone to psychologists, psychiatrists, and even went to a clinic that specialized in stuttering that cost her $10,000 and still got no relief. We did two sessions. Between our sessions, she visited with her psychiatrist and she told him about our first hypnosis session. He said, “That won’t work. It’s a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.”

We had our second and final session and a few weeks later I got a letter from her telling me she got up and gave a speech to the Chamber of Commerce and spoke flawlessly. She and her friends and family were amazed because she could hardly get out two sentences beforehand without stuttering.

If you judge something in your head as not workable without experiencing it, you’ll join the quackery club and may miss out on something that’ll help you.

I wrote the following many years ago: 

Some people abuse their power of discretion and it becomes a weapon that causes self-inflicted wounds. This is a way of saying that many people dismiss something out of hand because they judge it in their head.

I agree that if someone told you that parrot saliva was the cure for arthritis, you probably would be justified to raise an eyebrow. But if there was a long, documented history of people getting results with this method, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t investigate further, especially if you had arthritis.

So let’s pretend that you saw an ad for a product in Parade Magazine and then hobbled down to GNC and bought the product called “Pollyspittle” because you were curious. You took it home and then you chose not to use it. It seems counter-intuitive, but the reality is lots of people do that. It’s the next piece of behavior that’s mind boggling and counterproductive.

You hop on your computer and dash off a nasty-gram to the manufacturer saying, “This stuff couldn’t possibly work,” and add how disappointed you are. Question: What’s wrong with this picture? Answer: You judged it in your head.

No one’s claiming that you’re not entitled to an opinion. We all have them. But when you put the onus on someone else because your untested belief won’t allow you to take the recommended action, whose problem is that?

This type of head judging has no bearing on IQ. You could be Mensa material or dumber than a stump and still be guilty of this practice.

So, to sum up, don’t speak up about something you have no experience with and know nothing about. You may even want to try it out.

As for quackery, an appropriate usage of it is in the answer to this question: “Why do ducks fly upside down?” So they don’t “quack up.”

All the best,

John