Two Doctors, Both Alike In BabyPlus Quackery

What are you talking about? For the record, I'm only opposed to products endorsed by family members who don't disclose their personal financial stakes in a business--oh, and those products which are total bullshit and are marketed for twenty-plus years with a mixture of bogus faux-science, lies, and misrepresentation by a team of people who fake their credentials and lie about their studies, evidence, and effectiveness.

And while I'm kind of outraged that such people can persist in ripping gullible new parents off for so many years without being challenged, investigating and exposing it is actually kind of fun. Certainly more fun than just watching CSI or whatever.

are you freaking kidding me? Absolutely every piece of supposedly scientific evidence put forward by the Babyplus people turns out to be misrepresented, dishonest, unaccredited, and/or a paid advertisement. The beneficial claims Babyplus makes for its product vary widely by country and over time, depending on whatever is most important to parents at that place/moment. The inventor said he got his idea from a UFO. The company founder lied about almost every credential he has besides his undergraduate English degree. The company president's MD husband doesn't disclose his connection to the company when he endorses it.

If it will help you sleep, I will concede the possibility that alien fetal conditioning technology MAY exist and MAY prove beneficial to human development. But so far, basically everything about Babyplus is a gigantic, hilarious fiction.

haha, I love it.

I don't doubt that people endorse Babyplus; it's just none of those people are scientists or doctors who don't have a direct financial stake in the company.

As for "more scientific evidence," two points: the extraordinary benefits claimed for Babyplus in their marketing materials and by non-expert user/parents are SO all over the map, they are fundamentally unprovable. In Asia, they claim Babyplus improves children's academics. In the US, it's everything from easier breastfeeding and better sleep to talking 3 months before the neighbor's kid. I seriously doubt ANY scientific, peer-reviewed studies can exist that show Babyplus's effect in ANY post-natal development, any more than Baby Einstein did. WHICH IT DIDN'T.

And as for this vague "evidence" being "published as we speak," please tell your contacts at Babyplus to rush this information right over, so I can see the details. As someone committed to providing accurate information to new and expectant parents for over six years now, I'd love to see it. But given their extraordinary track record so far, where literally every single piece of scientific research, publication, or evidence Babyplus cites turns out to be a) an unaccredited, non-peer-reviewed, or otherwise non-scientific publication, b) a complete misrepresentation of the content or article or research, and/or c) a paid advertisement or pay-to-publish scam misrepresented as scientific research, I'm not getting my hopes up.

Somehow I doubt that Babyplus's new "evidence" will be able to match recent independent, cutting edge research on prenatal developmental impacts, such as the study claiming that babies learn German or French accents while in the womb, which made world-wide news. But which turns out to show nothing of the sort, because the researchers cherrypicked and massaged their data beyond all acceptable standards, and even then, the supposed differences they found turned out to be subjective and statistically non-existent. So, no.

The most comical of your slams is the idea that this entire investigation is based on competitive jealousy. Babyplus has been in existence for decades, since the Walkman era, when Dr [sic] Brent Logan heard a UFO abductee talking about the concept on the radio. So they beat everyone to the market. And while the MBA in me DOES think it would be nice to have an established product with a 95% margin that brings in $500,000 or more profit to me a year, my conscience unfortunately doesn't allow me to devise the giant web of scammery and emotional manipulation required to fleece well-meaning, gullible, and nervous pregnant people for $150 each. So in short, no, I don't have any product in the works in any way.

I'm plenty negative about other products when they warrant it, and positive, too. But it's true, Babyplus has found a warm spot in my heart. Partly, it's the decades of laziness by every other media outlet in the world. And the continued laziness of bloggers and journalists who don't bother to even Googlecheck the claims they're fed by Babyplus. Partly, it's the audacity of the product's claims, and the classic quackery of their claims to authority [i.e., fake degrees, fake professorships, fake scientific journals]. And then once the world's biggest baby company started reselling it with the exact same claims, the Babyplus achieved symbolic status, at least around here, standing for the entire industry devised to scare or worry or manipulate expectant parents into spending money.

But really, I pretty much ignore Babyplus now; I've gladly moved on. It's only when Babyplus sockpuppets come along making unjustified personal criticism and laughably vague arguments that I get to relive the good old days. So thanks for that, at least.

ah yes, the five minutes it took to respond to your last ad hominem smear on Jan. 10 is a sign of my callous disregard for the tens of thousands of Haitian earthquake victims two days in the future.

And you realize, of course, that in the time it took you to call previously unreported and never-contested facts "nasty, underhanded comments," you could have texted $30 more dollars to the relief effort yourself?

Unless you have news that Babyplus is donating all the accumulated profits from their decades-long quackery scam to Save The Children, I'll sugest you to not comment here again.