‘Hardcore science’ or ‘just a sticker’ – do anti-anxiety patches actually work?

SNT Gatchaman

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Staff member
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/07/nucalm-anti-anxiety-calming-discs

Torn between posting here or in the humour/entertainment thread. Enjoy.

The brand’s website is filled with so much jargon that it should be studied in every marketing class: allegedly, NuCalm’s “neuroacoustic technology” harnesses oscillations, frequencies and vibrations to change a person’s brain waves.

Guy Leschziner, professor of neurology and sleep medicine at King’s College London, told the Telegraph that the brand’s promised results “stretch the realms of credibility”.

They should have asked someone else at King's :giggle:
 
An article about technobabble:
Technobabble and tenuous terminology: the use of pseudo scientific language

Variations and related tactics
Pseudoscientific language is one indicator of what Stephen Law, in his book Believing Bullshit, calls pseudoprofundity:

Pseudoprofundity is the art of sounding profound while talking nonsense.

The Sokal hoax shows how easily pseudoscientific language can be used to fool people. Physicist Alan Sokal wrote the article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” which was published by the journal Social Text in 1996.
 
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