Health and the "Two Percent Improvement" Dilemma

"Doesn't it make you feel better?"

Uhmmmm....

Whether we were talking about physical health or mental health here, both industries are filled with all kinds of treatments, regimens, and magic supplements that allegedly will make you feel better and cure everything that ails you.

Some of these might be recommended by legitimate medical experts and institutions while others are being sold out of a garage maintained by somebody sprouting pseudoscience quackery without knowing the first thing about human physiology.

If you follow this plan you will feel immensely better and it'll change your life!

Take our supplement for the next 30 days and you will feel so much better than you have ever done before!

This exercise program will cause you to lose all the unwanted weight you have gained over the last decade!

I'll be the first to admit that I have tried any number of different plans and supplements and pieces of medical advice to keep myself in good health, and I will also be the first to admit that the vast majority of them don't really seem to work or — at least — I didn't feel any significant difference.

And I hasten to add that it wasn't because I didn't fully get into the plan and follow the instructions... there just wasn't much change.

I'm well aware of the fact that overstatements and exaggerations are part and parcel of marketing, almost no matter what field you're involved with. And perhaps there is no worse place to look than in the area of mental and physical health.

So are all these recommendations really pure quackery? Or are there some shreds of truth at their base, but we are simply led to believe that the effects will be much greater than they realistically could be?

I will say that the vast majority of the things I have tried did "work." But when I say they worked, they work to the extent that there was maybe a 2% or even 5% improvement, but it was definitely not anything earth-shattering... and definitely not worth the $39.95 a month price tag.

I actually gained a little bit more insight into the whole thing from a couple of visits with my regular medical doctor. She was making some recommendations about both my eating habits and my activity level, and one of the things that I noticed when she started talking about "how much better" I would feel was the base assumption that my current behavioral was wildly unhealthy to begin with.

Which was obviously false. My starting point was not a diet of bacon sandwiches and Big Macs, but a reasonably balanced and healthy diet, with perhaps a little excess here and there.

Once I explained what my current habits actually were — as opposed to what she was presuming them to be — a lot of her fervor and enthusiasm rather waned.

I imagine something similar holds true for a lot of the promises about supplements that allegedly can change your life as well as behavior modification patterns that will make a huge difference. The promised outcome may well be true for somebody who's basically a slug on a couch, but for somebody who's already relatively healthy, relatively active and eating decently the improvement is likely to be extremely small.

And this is where we get into the sketchy reality that purveyors of these systems and medications being well within their right to say that they're not lying. Indeed, there is an improvement — in my case maybe 2% to 5% — the LIE exists in the fact that the example they're holding forth concerns perhaps the most unhealthy person who has ever tried the supplement having the greatest amount of success ever.

But in a broad sense it would be a bit like claiming that if you go to work for Microsoft, you're going to make as much money as Bill Gates. Well... no, you're not.

But this is often how marketing of pretty much anything tends to work. The seller of the product or services appeals to our egos or sense of FOMO by citing the absolute extremely best case — which definitely is true — and then implying that everybody would have that kind of result when that is patently untrue.

I guess the takeaway here is that we must be cognizant of the fact that we should have realistic expectations when we decide to follow these recommendations, and not just take the tall promises and face value.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful weekend!

Comments, feedback and other engagement is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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2026.04.03 20:14 PST
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