In many cases testimonials are a wonderful thing. You saw a good movie last night and your friend typically likes the same movies, you tell him/her that you saw a good movie. If you use a good product, you might leave a good review on Amazon.com. People use those reviews to make an informed buying decision. It makes sense…
… but it doesn’t make logical sense with Health-based MLM Scams
Why? There are a number of reasons why this fails. Let’s cover them in bullet format:
- The MLM Product is not Approved by the FDA to Help with any Medical Condition – No MLM product, to my knowledge, has gotten approved by the FDA for helping with any medical condition. I don’t believe that any have even tried. A company that has a product that could help with a medical condition would make billions. Companies are in business to make money, so if they had a product that actually worked, they would get it approved by the FDA for the medical condition. The fact that they do not is tacit admission from the MLM company that the product doesn’t work for helping with any medical condition.
- The Placebo Effect – Health products are susceptible to the placebo effect. To read one example of an MLM product and the placebo effect see: MonaVie and the Placebo Effect. We know that a simple sugar pill that has no medicinal properties at all will help 30% of people on average. So if you got everyone in the United States to try it, you’d have over 100 million people swearing that sugar pills are the answer for all that ails them.
- Testimonies are Unverified and Anonymous- Much of the time, a testimonial will be written in the comment on a blog by an unknown person only identified by a first name. In almost every case, they don’t provide and evidence that their claim is true and they usually disappear or refuse to give their doctor’s information to back up the claim.
- Testimonies could be biased – The aforementioned anonymous testimonials could be from someone at the company or from a distributor of the product. These people have financial incentives to make the product appear to others as if it actually helps with a medical condition.
When you combine #3 and #4 above you get a picture of why when just about any health product, MonaVie, Xango, Zrii, Protandim, etc. goes MLM, it is clear why there overwhelmingly positive testimonials appear for the product. In the case of Protandim, there are very few reports of it doing anything from the years it was sold over the counter at GNC, but when it went MLM, the illegal health claims skyrocketed all over the internet. If there were a financial incentive for negative experiences to be shared, you can bet they would be more common.
In the end, insist that the product has FDA approval that it helps with that medical condition before spending your hard-earned money on the product. Remember that if it does not, the company doesn’t believe in its own product enough to prove itself. And if the company doesn’t believe in its product, why should you?
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