MARC AGRONIN: “Doc – have you heard the news about this amazing new jellyfish extract?” My patient and her son looked at me with wide-eyed excitement, confident that they had discovered a new elixir from the Fountain of Youth. How could their own doctor not know about this new breakthrough in memory enhancement, they wondered. And to prove their case, my patient related how she had already started taking the brain tonic and her memory was vastly improved. To their disappointment, I could not share the same level of enthusiasm in this new wonder product.
With time, however, two things became clear. First, the placebo response that the patient was riding high on began to ebb after a month, and she was back in my office looking for something more conventional to take. Second, someone was making an enormous amount of money selling this dubious brain tonic as the latest iteration in a long line of snake-oil equivalents.