This year my girlfriend put me on some decent snake oil indeed. Tens of euros worth of food supplements per month. I also went to see an acupuncturist. My problems aren't reduced, they're gone. I can be outside for an entire day and not notice a thing. My problem is, 0% of what I did is evidence-based medicine.
Now, this is the whole issue with snake oil. Anecotes like mine don't further science. But the Ars article puts all of Goop's stuff on a single big pile of "snake oil".
Isn't it possible that there are things that work, even though they have not been scientifically proven yet? Why can't there ever be a middle ground? I mean I also think homeopathy is a fraud. But I also know that either dried extract from Indian moringa trees or needles put into appropriate places in my body's "energy streams", or both combined, fixed all my problems. This is pretty major to me. I can live again.
In fact, I think there's an upside to non-evidence-based things selling more: maybe at some point the sellers will earn enough money to be able to finance decent clinical trials.
Many forms of irritable bowel syndrome (a disease defined by a list of symptoms, for which "there is no cure") can be fixed simply by changing your diet. I know someone who had stomach aches every day for 10 years and went to once a month simply by eating oatmeal every morning. Evidence based? No. I have no idea how you could ever design an affordable clinical trial for that, too many factors involed. The cost would be huge and the oatmeal industry doesn't have deep enough pockets.
I think that to dismiss everything that's not evidence based medicine as snake oil, like this article does, is just as bad as dismissing mainstream medicine like Goop appears to do.