It’s always good (and frustratingly rare) to see the mainstream media get it right when it comes to pseudoscience in medicine. Too often the narrative is – scientists are baffled at this alternative “one easy trick” to improve your health. Most mainstream articles on pseudoscience in medicine frame their reporting around a positive anecdote, and at best throw in some token skepticism as an afterthought, deep in the article that most readers won’t get to.
So I was happy to see an article in the BBC directly take on the appeal to nature fallacy and how it is used to market dubious health products. The article hits many of the notes that we have discussed often here. There is no clean definition of “natural”, and this vagueness is deliberately exploited by clever marketers. Further, there is absolutely no reason to think that substances or behaviors which occur in nature are better for human health than ones that are manufactured.
While the article was excellent as far as it went, I want to build on it a bit since I don’t think it fully captured the scope of this fallacy and its effects in our society. While the author, Amanda Ruggeri, correctly pointed out that this fallacy is hundreds of years old, the implications of this are worth exploring further.
The appeal to nature fallacy, the notion the products are inherently superior in direct proportion to how “natural” they are, has risen beyond marketing hype, and beyond mere propaganda. This has been a long term collective industry strategy that has altered society. In fact, research has shown that the “natural is better” bias is now the default in many areas – medicine, food, beauty products, lighting, even tobacco products (I will never forget the patient who reported smoking but reassured me that they only smoked organic cigarettes).
Rhetorically, the appeal to nature fallacy has also risen to a full-blown conspiracy theory in some forms. The narrative here is that nature has already provided everything we need to be perfectly healthy, but evil industry (Big Pharma, mainstream medicine, whatever) and their regulatory puppets have tried to deprive the public of the benefits of nature so they can sell more artificial treatments and products. The irony here is that it is the wellness/self-help/snake oil industry that is distorting reality for their own financial bottom line. One of their main champions, RFK Jr, is about to take charge of American healthcare.
This is more than just an innocent logical fallacy – this is a deliberate campaign of misinformation and disinformation, designed to defraud the public on a massive scale. The goal is to distract the public and their representatives from what really matters – what does the evidence say about the safety and effectiveness of any given product? But if you want to sell something that is unsafe and/or ineffective, you need to short circuit any process to determine these things objectively. So don’t look at the details, just be reassured and lulled into a false sense of security by the vague claim of being natural.
Often the promoters and sellers of such products just can’t be bothered with process. This is a major conflict in our society that even goes beyond science and medicine – we develop processes to determine what is fair, true, and reliable. These processes should be objective, transparent, and effective. The very concept of science-based medicine is all about process. The idea is that a good process will result in a good outcome.
But process is tedious, and doesn’t always result in an optimal outcome (because reality is complicated). Wouldn’t it be nice if we could bypass all that tedious, expensive, and complicated process an cut right to the outcome we desire? This is the ultimate appeal of the appeal to nature fallacy – substituting a simplistic algorithm (we like simplicity) for the complex process. Natural is good. Artificial is bad. To reinforce this algorithm we can also convince people that the process is corrupt, which is where the conspiracy theories come in.
Fully understood, the appeal to nature fallacy is not just a common mistake people make, it is a critical component of a cultural movement to dismantle the carefully constructed processes we have developed over more than a century to protect the public from fraud and harm. Why? Because some industries are inconvenienced by those processes. Specific industries target specific processes that are in their way, restricting their ability to defraud the public, extract resources, pollute the environment, change the climate, unleash dangerous but profitable products on the public, or whatever.
The wellness/alternative medicine industry (and this is a massive multi-billion dollar industry) leverages the appeal to nature fallacy and other strategies to relentlessly erode the processes we have developed to protect the public. They have tried to convince the public that they do not need protection, they just need unfettered access to all the natural cures that are out there.
This is the story I wish some mainstream outlets would tell. The public will lose tolerance for the tedious processes of science, research, review, transparency, and regulation if they don’t understand why we need them, and what the world was truly like before we had them. They may learn – the hard way – as we backslide into this pre-regulatory world where industry giants can foist their reality onto the public while saying – trust me, it’s natural.
BBC Takes On Appeal to Nature Fallacy