Published on 2026-07-25
Is there ever a real trick that 'doctors hate'?
The formula behind that ad is older than you'd think, and it was built to make a total absence of proof feel like proof of a cover up.
Scroll to the bottom of almost any news article and you will find a small grid of thumbnails, usually a face mid gasp, a belly with an arrow on it, a wrinkled hand next to a smooth one. 'This one trick left doctors speechless.' You already know, without clicking, roughly what waits on the other end. The question worth asking is why this exact formula, enemy and secret and miracle all in one small box, keeps showing up in the first place.
A grid with a name and a business model
That grid of thumbnails has a name: a chumbox, borrowed from 'chumming', the fishing practice of scattering bait to draw a catch closer. According to Wikipedia's account of the format, the writer John Mahoney gave it that name in a 2015 piece for the site The Awl, cataloguing the recurring themes: the shocked face, the miracle remedy, the celebrity gone wrong. Two companies, Taboola and Outbrain, became the main distributors, and by 2016 the format had spread to 41 of the top 50 news websites, including outlets that would never run the claim as an actual story. Publishers tolerated the reputational cost because the format is, in plain terms, reliable money.
The trick inside the trick
Notice what the formula is actually doing before you even reach the claim. It invents an enemy: doctors, or 'Big Pharma', a group with an obvious motive to suppress a cheap cure because it threatens expensive treatments. It invents a secret: something 'they' don't want you to know. Once both of those pieces are in place, the formula has quietly solved its own biggest problem. There is no study, no name, no institution behind the claim, and normally that absence would be a reason to doubt it. Here, the absence is repackaged as the whole point: of course there's no study, the enemy is hiding it.
A real discovery needs evidence. A fake one only needs a villain to explain why the evidence never shows up.
What happens when someone actually tries it
This is not just a rhetorical trick with no victims. In 2016, a US federal court in Florida entered a 30 million dollar judgment against Nicholas Scott Congleton, who ran the marketing behind a supplement called Pure Green Coffee through his company NPB Advertising, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC's case described a scheme that built fake news websites, complete with the mastheads of fictitious outlets and stolen logos from real ones, to make an ad look like an independent report. The pitch claimed the product caused an average weight loss of 17 pounds in 12 weeks, without diet or exercise. Most of the defendants had already settled the FTC's charges the year before. The trick was never a trick. It was a sales funnel, dressed as a discovery, that a court eventually priced at 30 million dollars in penalties.
The case did not end with the judgment. The Federal Trade Commission has continued sending refunds to people who bought Pure Green Coffee, with more than 905,000 dollars returned to consumers years after the original claims first ran. That timeline matters: the ad, the purchase, the disappointment, and the eventual refund can be separated by close to a decade. Nobody who clicked that thumbnail expecting a shortcut got their weight loss. Most of them, eventually, got a small check instead, which is a strange kind of ending for a trick that was supposed to change everything in a few weeks.
The honest version of caution here is not 'no cheap remedy ever works'. Some do, and ordinary, unglamorous treatments get discovered all the time without any conspiracy attached: a spice, a stretch, a change in sleep timing, quietly confirmed by researchers who publish their method and let other scientists try to poke holes in it. What separates that kind of finding from the chumbox version is not how strange the claim sounds. It is how easy the claim is to check, and how many independent people have already tried.
So the tell is simpler than judging the remedy itself: follow where the link actually leads. A real medical finding leads to a paper, a hospital, a name you can call and a method you can read. The chumbox version leads, nearly every time, to a store, a checkout page, or a longer video that circles back to the same product from a slightly different angle.