Well, not often other than Leap Years am I remotely persuaded to buy a product shown on this version of Ideal World, but I am going to take a punt and try this emu balm. I suffer from ‘shot knees’ through years of walking for work, essentially. Both are down to the bone now. The pain at times can be intolerable. Hell - it may work or it may do nothing, but I won’t know until I try some. Not buying it from Ideal World, though. £3 cheaper on Amazon…
Emu oil made it on the list of the FDA's "health frauds", and the few scant animal studies on emu oil (which is what's in the balm) is weak, very vague (i.e. "slight reduction in redness" - nothing to back up the wild claims IW throw out), and as of 2024 yet to be replicated in humans in clinical studies.
As with most health products: if it's sold more on anecdotes and alleged testimonies, and talk of "natural, used for thousands of years", it's probably quackery. Arsenic and mercury were used as natural remedies for a long time too. If there's a sniff of real science involved, they'll bang you over the head with it in the marketing - like the collagen supplement companies do with the cherry-picked stats from the few clinical studies that show any effect.
And apparently a lot of emu oil sold is fake (as emu farms aren't that common), so be wary of anything too cheap or, if from Amazon, being sold by random brands with auto-generated gobbledygook brand names.
Though, I should add, placebo effect is not to be dismissed.
All pharmaceutical drugs go through blind human trials (where one group has the real thing, the other a dummy) and
every single time a % of the placebo group (but not all) will see improvements, often quantitive, measurable clinical improvements for whatever the 'issue' is. It's a shame scientists aren't as interested in finding out exactly how placebo is triggered and works, rather than dismissing "placebo" as "not real" when it's the opposite.
