The rise and fall of snake oil
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
I work in neurotech/sleeptech and one of the biggest challenges I see in our industry is, if not pure snake-oil, the over-hype of "backed by research".
People have accused us of being snake-oil as well, and I get why they might think that if you haven't read or don't understand the science.
I've seen products that claim to be Vagus Nerve stimulators that are worn on the wrist, nowhere near the vagus nerve. Products that claim to mimic the "magnetic frequency of hormones".
We've also got the current "It's got electrolytes" craze which is kinda crazy that we've truly replicated idiocracy.
For those curious, I'm the co-founder of affectablesleep.com
Honestly this website doesn't seem to even be trying to sell anything. "Help your sleep" how? "doesn't make you sleep longer" but what does it do instead? Do I feel more restored when I wake up even with a shorter sleep time? It's not even trying to sell me on a specific outcome that I John Everyman is facing.
Snake oil things are typically very light on details and this site is also light on details. Maybe it's a victim of form over function? The site's design looks nice but has very low information density.
This is why we describe the neural function of sleep, but can't specifically get into details regarding increases in slow-wave activity, 15% decrease in early night cortisol, 14.5% increase in HRV, etc etc. We can link to the research, but can't say "this is what we do".
We are relying on user testimonials, which we are gathering through our beta testing and beyond.
At the same time, we do describe the "clearer thinking", "immune function", "stress" etc about half way down the page.
It's something we will continue to get better at.
If the device came with a year free, or even a 6 month subscription, sure. But over $500 for a sleep aid is asking a lot.
We decided to go with a low device cost and subscription to make it cost effective to purchase when finances allow us to get to a monthly instead of yearly subscription.
When I worked on Microsoft Band, we wanted to have really nice side buttons. Great feel, not only the material, but the perfect spring tension, a great clicking sound, everything. We had someone who obsessed over them month after month, trying different polishes, colors, materials, spring types, everything.
$2 a button, 2 buttons, $4 total on the BOM. Absurd. Yes the buttons were great, but we couldn't justify $4 for them. But that was the best any of our suppliers were able to do for metal buttons. We had spun off the Xbox accessories team, so we really knew buttons, but we really knew plastic buttons of a certain type. Metal buttons were kicking our butts.
Then someone asked: "have we tried a watch supplier?"
So yeah, like 25 cents per button for the exact same buttons. It wasn't that our other suppliers were ripping us off, they just weren't setup to make the type of buttons we needed, in those quantities, at the price we needed.
So what I'm saying is, your base product is already expensive. It costs the same as an entire smart watch capable of running an operating system. You probably have lots of specialized components, lots of custom hardware, but your base price is already high and I hope you don't have any $4 buttons in the product, they are easy to overlook. I also get it is because you are doing small batch runs, and you are amortizing all the tooling and dev work over a small number of units, but you are not low cost. You are an unknown product selling adjacent to a bunch of snake oil people, if you were just $200 by itself I could maybe see it as an impulse buy to try out, but plus the subscription, ouch.
What makes you think an EEG headband is not just a smartwatch in a different form-factor? We're running an nrf53 plus extra storage. We don't have a screen, but screens are fairly inexpensive. We've got a full EEG system.
We have actually done pretty well at limiting the number of parts. The headband is so thin it's buttonless. We didn't have room for a button and created a fully buttonless interface.
There are parts you wouldn't think would be expensive but are. Bone-conduction transducer, heart-rate sensor, etc etc. Yes, we could ditch the HR and save some money but we feel it will be beneficial.
Watches are a thing that exists. EEG sleep headbands aren't. We had to create our own materials for EEG sensing. Everything else on the market have limited life and aren't comfortable enough for sleeping.
Of course, all the plastics and TPU are custom. The fabrics are custom. Our scale is also very small right now, so I fully expect the cost to come down significantly with scale.
I guess my main point is that your device's price is firmly in the luxury impulse purchase category. It is only low price from the perspective of high earning coastal tech workers.
> Of course, all the plastics and TPU are custom.
Ugh getting the coating right on band took so long. Sunscreen stains everything.
That and a lens cover for the UV sensor that was transparent to UV and not just cheap plastic that'd shatter the second you slightly banged into it.
When we first started, many in the sleep community were against using these techniques. A significant number of the studies look specifically at safety, and often people report to these as "null results" when in fact what was being examined was the potential negative impact.
One example is the study on metabolic function [1], which showed no result in healthy men. It did not harm their metabolic function, though it also didn't improve it (though I'm not sure how you would measure improvement in healthy metabolic function).
For our company, there are many modalities and capabilities we are building for the future, we began with auditory stimulation and this one in particular due to the low-risk and volume of research.
The modern emphasis on electrolytes is directionally correct but ultimately silly. Most electrolyte satchets and drinks are just overpriced salt water with artificial flavoring and sweeteners. The majority of the Western world actually fails to meet their recommended intake of potassium and magnesium. The former is rare in beverages because of its bitter taste and possible drug interactions. Magnesium is also used somewhat sparingly because certain forms create GI distress. This is very unfortunate since both of these minerals are essential to overall health and of great benefit to the cardiovascular and circulatory systems when taken in recommended amounts.
I dump Lite Salt (potassium and sodium chloride in equal amounts), Stevia, and powdered grapefruit into a bottle and shake to make my own electrolyte drink. It's dirt cheap and tastes like flat Fresca.
In the water that I drink in the morning I dissolve small quantities of powders of magnesium bisglycinate and potassium citrate.
Before starting to do this, after days with more intense physical effort, I frequently had nocturnal leg cramps. Since I began taking this regularly, I never had leg cramps again.
I also say for me because if you already have good levels of magnesium in your diet, it will have nothing to improve.
You are welcome to review his methodology and see if it still seems like the placebo effect.
Normally, the amount of chloride intake should not exceed the amount of sodium intake, i.e. one should not ingest other chlorides except table salt. The normal amount of chloride in the body is less than that of sodium, a part of the sodium ions being neutralized by bicarbonate anions. Any excess chloride requires additional work for the kidneys, to eliminate it from the body. Excreting chloride is also likely to take with it some of the useful metallic cations that you have supplemented.
Other metallic cations than sodium should be combined with organic anions, i.e. one should ingest their salts made with organic acids chosen from normal nutrients.
Good choices are potassium citrate (one of the cheapest organic acids that is also a normal component of food) and magnesium bisglycinate (because the magnesium salts of cheaper organic acids, like citric acid, are not soluble in water, while magnesium bisglycinate not only is soluble in water, but it also does not form solid precipitates with other components of food, which would prevent its absorption in the gut).
Both potassium citrate and magnesium bisglycinate can be found as cheap pure powders, which are preferable to any other forms, like capsules, which contain useless excipients for which there is no reason to be introduced in your body.
Besides sodium, the only other exception to the rule of using salts of organic acids is calcium, which can be supplemented as calcium phosphate or bone meal. However, calcium phosphate powder is not soluble in water, so unlike sodium and magnesium salts powders it cannot be put in drinking water, but it should be mixed like table salt in some solid food, before eating it.
Bisglycinate is the cheapest form of chelate magnesium, but there are somewhat more expensive forms of chelate magnesium, which use other amino-acids instead of glycine. Someone who is very sensitive to glycine could use those. The non-chelate forms of magnesium are prone to form solid precipitates that pass through the gut without being absorbed.
Much more glycine than in a Mg supplement would be provided by any food with gelatin, so if someone really has glycine sensitivity, that should manifest when eating food with gelatin.
It was always in the plans, we're all actually on Android, but we wanted to get the user experience right on one platform and not spread ourselves too thin, but we're thinking AI makes a big difference here, so... no announcement yet, but it was never going to be iPhone forever.
I still can't say for sure we'll have android at launch, but we'd like to.
The structure of the app is in rust, so that is shared across platforms. The challenge is in the UI elements, and the cross platform stuff just isn't as good as going native there. You end up building a bunch of custom components anyway.
I'm also a bit wary of BLE on Android. iOS, is a bit more of a known entity.
It isn't just iOS and Android either. Because we support researchers, we also have a web app that they use. It surprising how large our technology footprint is across services, firmware, web, and apps.
But Brawndo's got what plants crave.
Notably, they ended up being shut down due to a lack of actual snake oil in the product, not because of their claims that snake oil cured maladies.
If we can draw a lesson for busting today’s multitude of scams, it might be easier to prove the scam is bogus on its own terms rather than appealing to science or medicine or financial authorities.
https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/california-tech-world-so... (I had to check if they were still in business, they used to be mentioned frequently on HN but haven't for years)
The phrase comes not from the ineffectiveness of snake oil, but rather from the common practice of selling counterfeit snake oil, that is to say selling some other liquid falsely labeled as snake. There was a famous Federal bust of a snake oil salesman, and after testing it was revealed that he was selling a liquid with beef fat instead of honest-to-God snake fat.
I don't read the trademark registration as "snake oil" brand, it looks more like "Clark Stanley's" brand. The word brand should follow the trademarked name, and while this application does not contain the term brand, up at the top it says "Trademark. Clark Stanley. Linament."
the article starts out "over the 19th Century", and this trademark is from 1900, so a latecomer to the snake oil market, unlikely to be able to trademark the term "snake oil".
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/snake-oil-salesme...
What I take from this is that AI code, biology, etc, will not announce itself. We will have to announce the human-produced content. Introductions are about to be ritualistic again. Queue humorous (but not really all that valid) counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoe24aSvLtw
Hence the problem with snake oil is not the product, it is how it has been sold.
There are many other products that are a whisker away from the same fate. For example, olive oil. Can anyone say they have had the pure and unadulterated stuff? There is no way of knowing unless you have pressed your own olives.
It is the same deal with honey. None of that honey in the supermarket could possibly be legitimate, at the price it is at.
Fortunately, the body can handle some pretty wide variation. But unfortunately if you are taking a vitamin because you lack a nutrient, there's really no guarantee that your actually treating that deficiency.
Fortunately most people are not lacking a nutrient. Also fortunately most (but not all - the exceptions cause problems when they become the hype!) vitamins people take in large quantities are water soluble and you just pee out extra.
In that case, I worry less that the vitamin contains too much and more that it doesn't contain enough. Both could be a problem. There are also a few like iron which take longer for the body to purge where overdosing is a real problem.
$20 in 1915 is like $650 today
Anywhere a group of people gathers to downplay pharmaceuticals or evidence based medicine, you'll find them pushing their own untested and unregulated junk.
And yet they can be a great source for Omega-3 fatty acids, most notably the Chinese water snake up to 20% EPA, the Erabu Sea Snake high in DHA. Rattlesnakes are much lower, around 5% to 6% Omega-3's better than nothing. I will always personally prefer Krill Oil for the high absorption.
There will always be scammers and grifters but I would prefer to not let them ruin the original product they are trying to exploit.