Hi,
A bit lighter topic, sort of.
My father saw a device on tv that purported to help with Sciatica. I read up on it and it was BS, obvious BS. So, he took a knee brace, stuck some towels in it, created his own and is now bragging to me that he feels better.
The thing is, maybe it helps, maybe he stands differently with it on, maybe it makes him more conscious of how he moves, maybe he just got a little bit better? Probably, it's not doing anything and he's just imagining it, which is fine.
Thing is, the elderly get hit with **** like this all of the time. An "As Seen On TV" product usually costs almost nothing and really it's a no harm no foul kind of thing but it can warp into more serious things.
I'm curious how you all deal with stuff like this?
MIL was and is bladder incontinent like many people with dementia. It started as one of the very first symptoms of her dementia before even other symptoms caused problems.
Because with her every breath, she always denied even the hint she might have dementia, the bladder/peeing problem was going to be solved with pills. She took every pill on the market that promised 'bladder this' and/or 'bladder that'.
No amount of evidence or discussion would convince MIL that a pill wouldn't help her incontinence.
All those various weird pills caused her to be extremely constipated.
So then came the next step -- taking laxatives. These increased to having to take more and more and more each day for relief until one day....
MIL found and bought from a catalog what she believed to be the perfect guaranteed to work or your money back laxative. Over a two-day period, she took one in the morning, two with each meal, and one at night before bed. Yes, 8 pills one day and 8 pills the next because according to her "they aren't working".
The more laxatives she took, the more thirsty she became so she drank more water which caused her bladder to overreact so she took more bladder pills for those two days as well.
As we later found out, they weren't actually mild laxatives like she believed. They were...
[scroll down]
Prescription strength COLON CLEANSE PILLS!
For days, there was a literal **** storm. Lesson learned to not trust everything you read in a catalog. :-)
Thankfully, he doesn't buy as much anymore. His thing is buying 12 more of something that he already has, such as nail clippers.
It could be worse, right?
Your dad probably feels better for all the reasons you mentioned and has little to do with his new device. As long as he feels better and isn't complaining of pain, I would go along with it and hype up the new device as a cure-all, too.
YouTube ads are terrible this way, too; many are pitching something ridiculous with exaggerated claims layered on top of rousing music. Blah. lol
These semi-scammy marketing deals have been around since the beginning of time.
'they can't put it on TV if it's not true'.
We all have long since quit trying to educate her. She buys objects, luckily, rather than medical supplements, so it's really just lost money.
I personally HATE that one-time athletes or celebrities hawk these things. My mother ADORES Tom Selleck and he was pushing RM's ( I think) She actually said that whatever he was selling, she'd buy two of!
Luckily, she has my YB who oversees any expenditure of over $200 and so she is somewhat limited by that.
Right now the biggest scam seems to be the 'one tablespoon of THIS magic herb will melt fat off your body overnight!' Drives me nuts.
I don't know who believes this and buys this stuff, but clearly, some do.
FIL is nearly 90 years old. Diabetic and weighs in at 300 lbs at last successful weigh in. Until COVID hit he was still able to take himself out and get his own food. Once COVID hit he told BIL/SIL what he wanted to eat and they provided it. If they tried to get him to eat healthy it was met with angry outbursts and tantrums and at his age honestly even his doctor advised that it wasn't worth it to fight the battle anymore and just let him eat what he wants to eat.
That being said...he conquers all with insulin...and HE claims to want to lose weight.
Anyone knows that the secret to weight loss is quite literally at the very least watching what you eat and moving your body...two things that he refuses to do. So...he and his sister put their heads together and found....
WEIGHT LOSS PILLS!!!
Yes, friends...the answer to all of his woes....pop a pill and all of the fat will just melt away instantly while he continues to lay in the bed 12-15 hours a day and sit in a chair the other hours and eat whatever he wants....and he'll be svelte no time!! That's what the ads say! She sends him all of this propaganda and he's ready to buy it!
He goes to the doctor and just so happens to mention it...(this is not the first time he has asked for weight loss meds and his doctor has flat told him even prescription weight loss meds are an absolute no with his comorbidities)
He is telling his doctor all about this great new weight loss pill that his sister said would help him lose 50 pounds fast and wouldn't interact with ANY of his existing meds or issues and that he wants to try it. His doctor almost exploded. Told him that whatever it was he was considering was already trending for causing issues with people with heart problems (which FIL has) and that it clearly says that people with uncontrolled blood sugar shouldn't use it (also an issue) and that he didn't know how many times he was going to have to tell FIL that there is NO MAGIC PILL to help him lose weight!
Sigh, we had to call his sister and BEG her to stop trying to help him find a weight loss pill and start to encourage him to move and eat better unless she wanted to kill him.
Literally every single time he sees a commercial for a weight loss drug he starts looking it up on his computer and talking about ordering it.
He is convinced there is a magic pill that will help him lose 100 pounds overnight by staying in bed all day and its just a matter of finding it. So far we have been lucky that he hasn't tried them yet.
The commercials to me are juvenile and certainly not persuasive. However, I've always done research on doctors before selecting them.
Other silly commercials are the weight loss ones, touting some product which apparently has power to cause weight loss other than safe dieting.
But the prescription meds ones are perhaps the worst, encouraging people to raise with their doctors the issue of taking something just because some big pharma outfit is spending big bucks on swaying through vulnerable commercials.
And then there are those ridiculous and obnoxious sports star commercials extolling the virtues of some Medicare Advantage plan, as if they've just landed on the moon and are captured by the amazing experience.
And while I'm on the soapbox, what about the heavy push of charities (including one which I recall had been evaluated and was determined to be run by a fraudster), touting $19/monthly. Some outfit is really aggressively pushing these, and some of the charities are actually good.
I've thought several times how nice it is to see just a car commercial, something at a far more mature level, than all the garbage for whatever product is being pushed.
I think there will always be fraudsters and scammers; I often wonder about their upbringing, if they were absent from school and/or never learned or weren't interested in supporting themselves through legitimate means.
think back to Ron Popeil way back to the 1960's and the Pocket Fisherman and the Veg-o-Matic.
Funny thing is he is laughing all the way to the bank even now. And not all the products are/were garbage. There have been some clunkers.
Others are following suit. And they all target what is the "focus" this week, month, year. It could be Health products, technology, anything.
If your dad's contraption works great. If it is the placebo effect or if it is real does it matter?
What you have to watch out for is...Can he manage his own finances at this point? Are all his bills being paid, on time? Is he making sound decisions in other aspects of his life?
Example, my daughter-in-law and her two teen girls were buying high priced makeup just because it was pitched by a celebrity who had placed her name onto the product. I just could not convince them that the basic drug store makeup was pretty much the same product but without the celebrity's name and ridiculous price..... [sigh].
Bravo to your Dad for creating his own similar product with items he had around the house. My Dad would also do things like that. That told me he was careful about money.
Time to worry is when an elder is writing checks or buying gift cards for a scam.