Airborne is Bullshit

What is Airborne? Well it was created by a school teacher.

Did I mention it was created by a school teacher?

What did she teach? Well it was created by a school teacher.

Whoops? Did I mention it was created by a school teacher?

Airborne is a pill, it can be found at most pharmacies and its primary claim is that it prevents colds.

I saw it at the store and wanted to buy it, then I learned about quackery.

Quackery is fake medicine, and in this blog I will try to argue that Airborne is quackery.

According to the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast, Airborne contains several times the recommended dosage of vitamin A. So much that if you take a vitamin A supplement, you could overdose on vitamin A. This is an increadibly painful experience, I have overdosed on vitamins before, it hurts.

The host of the Skeptic’s Guide, Steve Novella, is a physician by the way.

But, maybe if he was a school teacher he would know better.

The bottles of the little magic pills of schoolteachery say that you should  dissolve pills in water and drink.

Then what happens in reality is you get a megadose of vitamins, and you piss most of them out.

Yep.

Thats just a fact.

But what happens in the magical world of schoolteachery is your immune system gets a boost and kicks the cold’s ass.

IF YOU ARE A SCHOOL TEACHER I TREASURE YOU, AS LONG AS YOU DON’T PRETEND TO BE A PHARMACOLOGIST WHEN YOU ARE NOT ONE.

But what happens in the magical world of schoolteachery is your immune system gets a boost and kicks the cold’s ass.

So is there proof for this?

If there was I could not find it.

In fine print on the bottles it says

"These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to io diagnose, cure, or prevent disease."

The author of whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com
qouted the pharmacologist David Kroll at Duke Medical School as saying:

"Simply washing your hands during cold and flu season is a much more effective way of preventing colds."

Airborne has claimed to do a study on its product with positive results but it has been taken off their site because they said it was done when they were still a small company.

Quick! Quick! Name that logical fallacy!?

Its a false dichotomy, being a small company during a good and positive study does not contrast with displaying that study now that you are a big company.

Studies after all are just words, graphs, and numbers that should be replicable with following the directions in the methods section of the study.

This is how science works.

Of course the blogger above mentioned found that the study used no scientists or doctors in their study.

Wow.

Clinical trials require at least supervision by physicians.

In the mother of all understatements David Kroll said, "I would not define that as a clinical trial."

So there you go.

During the peak of flu season I was at the pharmacy buying real medicine.

I saw a guy looking at Airborne.

I said that stuff is bullshit, and proceeded to talk him out of buying it.

I then spent the day thinking about how when I call God bullshit I use parallel reasoning to determine airbornes quackery.

Strange that one was so well recived by a random person. And one is almost guaranteed to get me a stigma.

Toodles.

Listen to this episode