Quacks and Pingbacks in the Penny Press!

I’ve had occasion to comment many times here at Stevereads about some of the contradictions that seem hard-wired into the particular magazine sub-genre of the lad-mag “men’s” titles. They routinely feature ‘back to basics’ articles teaching their audience of over-salaried douche-dudes how to strip away the clutter from their lives and live simply and organically, but the also feature glossy product-endorsements for $25,000 bicycles and $70,000 wristwatches. They line up the most enticing recipes for healthy salads and smoothies, but their pages are loaded with color ads for cigars and chewing tobacco. And as a persistent curiosity, although they notify their readers of all the various health problems they’ll face once they’re their editors’ ages, they also feel the need to have an in-house doctor to answer emailed questions. And the doctors are always, always quacks.

Probably this is because real doctors, responsible ones, are both too busy and too smart to try trash-compacting meaningful scientific answers into bite-sized ‘Hey Bro’ two-sentence answers, but that just makes the whole phenomenon more troubling, since it means the quacks who end up taking the job – who’ll very likely be the only medical authority these young readers consult until their prostates drop through the kitchen floor – pretty much have the field to themselves. The resultant reading can be entertaining, as long as you don’t take any of it too seriously.

A perfect case in point would be the – and I’m not making this up – “Ask Dr. Bob” feature of my beloved Men’s Journal. The feature promises: “Our in-house doc answers your questions about health, fitness, and living adventurously,” and this latest issue starts off with a pretty simple question: “Every spring, my asthma gets worse. What can I do?”

Dr. Bob always has an answer at the ready, and his first lines are usually geared along the Superfreakonomics line of “What? But I thought – I mean, I always assumed … wow! tell me more!” And this is no exception: he fires back, “Get some sunshine.”

Sunshine? But I thought we were talking about asthma? Huh? Dr. Bob explains:

A recent study from Tel Aviv University of more than 20,000 asthmatics found that those with a vitamin D deficiency were 25 percent more likely to have flare-ups. Asthma causes inflammation in, and narrowing of, the airways; vitamin D may counter these ill effects by bolstering the immune system and reducing inflammation. Natural light is the best way for your body to synthesize the vitamin, and you should aim for 15 minutes of rays – or about half the time it takes for your skin to turn pink – two or three times a week (you can find out exactly how much sun you need for your skin type and location with the app Dminder). And if you can’t get outside, take a vitamin D supplement of at least 2,000 IU daily.

Sunshine! What? But I thought – I mean, I always assumed …

The Tel Aviv study Dr. Bob mentions of course turns out to be less than useless, except for its counter-intuitive value. It involved hundreds of thousands, even millions, of patient records … but no living patients, and certainly no actual testing: in other words, it was just an extended exercise in computer algorithms. And computer algorithms from only one study. Given the base numbers, the same ‘study’ could also have found a correlation between asthma flare-up and being left-handed. Want to help your asthma? Try switching your writing hand! A recent study shows … What? My writing hand? But I thought  – I mean, I always assumed … So what’s the point of the blithe reply? My guess would be to root around in that Dminder app (who helped develop it, who has financial stakes in Dr. Bob recommending it, who’s helping its developer – RobCo., Inc, to publicize it, etc.), but it hardly matters – Dr. Bob has plenty more advice to dispense. Like to this poor sufferer:

I recently broke my arm skiing. Is there anything I can do to stay in decent shape while I recover?

And Dr. Bob’s answer?

First, keep exercising your good arm. Doing shoulder presses and raises, triceps extensions, and biceps curls with your non-injured arm will actually prevent your bad arm from getting weaker. That’s thanks to a process called the contralateral strength training effect – when one side gets stronger, it helps the other side retain strength, too. (A recent study found this can actually help you gain 8 percent of strength in your injured limb.)

What? A kind of exercise that strengthens muscles you aren’t working? But I thought … I mean, I always assumed …

Fortunately, there’s always the mighty TLS as a respite from quackery … to ping-backery! In online parlance, a ‘pingback’ happens when something you wrote is linked-to from somewhere out there in cyberspace. I don’t have any use for that definition here, since Stevereads is still, after all these years, the best-kept secret in the book-circles of the Internet, but in lieu of actual, you know, popularity, I’ve devised a different definition: for me, a ‘pingback’ happens when a literary journal to which I subscribe publishes a review of a book I myself have likewise reviewed.

That happened not once, not twice, but three times in the 6 March issue of the TLS. Gerald Butt took care of two of those three times all by himself, reviewing in one piece both Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination by Stefan Ihrig and Islam and Nazi Germany’s War by David Motadel. He found both books very worthy, as did I, reviewing the Ihrig here and the Motadel here. And Sumita Mukherjee turned in a shorter but very tight review of Anita Anand’s delightful Sophia, about the Sikh princess Sophia Duleep Singh, who became a suffragette during the reign of her godmother Queen Victoria. I reviewed the book for a newspaper on the other side of the world and had a grand time doing it, so I was pleased that Mukherjee categorizes it as “necessary” – grudging though such a term tends to sound.

And when I was done enjoying those pingbacks, I cut them out of the issue, crumpled them up, and ate them with a chaser of prune juice. I read a Yelp review that mentioned somebody mentioning a study somewhere that said crumpled-up book reviews help you re-grow your baby teeth, you see, and I really miss those little guys.

Re-grow baby teeth!!! But I thought … I mean, I always assumed …