Pathways to Consumer Insight
The history of medicine can be reduced to six bullet points:
There is more than a little truth behind the joke. A gap has opened up between (a) what the mainstream medical and pharmaceutical professions tell us about curing our ills, and (b) what many of us think is doing us good.
This gap has been enthusiastically filled by herbalists, therapists, diet gurus and any number of ‘alternative’ treatments and cures, many no doubt highly efficacious. But it’s curious how we have reached a moment in history when science seems finally to have proven that virtually all malfunctions in the human body are molecular in origin; yet at precisely the same moment in our history comes an explosion of public belief in the curative powers of an arcane and bewildering range of ‘natural’ substances. Some of them sound frankly weird.
There are few better places for studying such human foibles than New York City. You should take a look in the Westerly Health Food store in midtown Manhattan, on the corner of 49th Street and 9th Avenue. For anyone wondering what they sell in there, an illuminated sign over the door proclaims Westerly as purveyors of “Vitamins, Minerals, Herbs and Amino Acids”. Yum Yum.
The exterior of the shop looks about as impressive as a village post office. (I caught myself looking for the postcards in the window asking after lost cats and dogs). However, once you get inside, you realize the place is huge, an entire supermarket dedicated to ingestible substances rarely heard of, but all apparently legal. The place does a roaring trade with people who breeze in after their Sunday-morning jog in Central Park. As you wander along the shelves, be careful not to smile. All the regulars in there look deadly serious.
The products themselves are quite simply amazing. Just past the fresh vegetable rack — organic broccoli, yams and sunchokes (sunchokes?) — are the Dioxin-Free Teabags. Next-door is a big shelf of RiboseX, a fruit-flavoured ‘energy formula’ powder which contains wonderfully-named ingredients like Creatine and Taurine. If you need something stronger, how about HardFast, “the world’s first Anabolic-Metabolic accelerator”, described on the pack as “hard-core nutrition for serious athletes”? (Vanilla flavour only. C’mon, you’re not allowed to have fun with this stuff).
Beyond health-food, the store offers organic remedies for practically everything that ails you, including All-Natural Colon Clenz (don’t ask). Are you maybe prone to memory loss? Try Brain Gum, the “mental alertness dietary supplement chewing gum”. I’m perfectly serious.
Though nowhere near US levels yet, signs of this developing market are already visible in Europe. Well over a quarter of Europeans are dosing themselves with vitamins and supplements, and the figure seems to be on the rise, particularly in France.
The pendulum of opinion swings regularly back and forth between ‘official science’ and ‘alternative science’. As consumers continue to grope, with touching faith, towards magic elixirs of life (but organic, please!), the pharmaceutical industry pushes ever harder for scientific solutions. $55 billion a year is being spent on medical research. Not all of this is aimed at conventional maladies, since humanity has now developed other ‘complaints’ to worry about, such as stress, reduced libido, mood swings and being the wrong shape. The more ills we develop, real or imagined, the more research and development money the industry throws at finding the answer.
Oh, sorry, you forgot the question? Here, chew this Brain Gum.
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