Our company is listed here. How can we be removed?

Are you sure you want to be removed? This is a huge marketing opportunity for you. We link to your outcomes reports. That’s valuable exposure for you.

Haha. Seriously, how can we be removed from your site?

If you would like to issue a public apology on your site for misleading people and also thank us for pointing out the mistake, we will be happy to remove any material you would like removed.

We are also happy to post responses to anything we say about you. All legitimate responses will be posted.

Let’s get down to brass tacks.   How much are you going to blackmail us in order to get us off, so that we can continue pitch our products to our marks, without them finding out about this site?

Blackmail? My goodness. Someone has an active imagination. What if we told you that you could get paid to be taken off this list one of two ways:

1. You can publicly apologize on your website for your mistakes, and thank us for helping you identify them, as noted above;
2. If you don’t want to deal with us, you can earn outcomes validation from any legitimate organization that validates and indemnifies outcomes. So far there is only one such organization, The Validation Institute, that confers legitimate outcomes validations, as opposed to simply giving their friends awards even if they harm employees.

In either case, we pay you $1000.  Yes, you read that right. All you have to do is be honest — something that you should be anyway — and you get a check for $1000!

However, if you are simply caught–to use a technical term that is very familiar to the wellness industry — lying through your teeth, you may also pay us $20,000 to be removed.

That seems like a lot of money just to take our name off a list.

It’s a small price to pay for a lifetime license to snooker unsuspecting employers. And there are a number of vendors out there who have opted to do exactly that.

This doesn’t seem very nice.

Whoa! We’re offering you $1000 for doing something you should be doing anyway (telling the truth). That is very nice of us.

Speaking of not nice, you’re the ones basing your entire business models on lies and harms to employees. How is that nice? Some people would argue we should turn you in to the authorities, except that because this industry is completely unregulated, there are no authorities to turn you in to.  In fact, the reason you are here is probably that someone turned you in to us.

Once there are some “authorities” to turn you in to, we will dispense with the fees and let them take care of fining and penalizing you.

And this site really is a lot nicer than you think.  No one who criticizes us ever allows us to respond like we allow you to respond.  We would certainly welcome anyone offering us the same “not nice” consideration we are offering others!  Quite the contrary, Johns Hopkins employee Ron Goetzel and his cronies at the Health Enhancement Research Organization circulated a secret poison pen letter to members of the media to try to discredit us, without giving us a chance to respond. Needless to say we were thrilled when we found out and encourage you to read it.

One vendor even tried unsuccessfully to get us thrown off of Linkedin so that we couldn’t expose their lies.

Are there any honest vendors?

Yes.  There are two websites full of them. One is called www.validationinstitute.com.   We are not formally connected with them but have a great deal of respect for their work. The other is The Employee Health and Wellness Program Code of Conduct. Any honest vendor or consultant can endorse it.

How do we determine if our vendors are honest?

Ask them to get validated. And ask them to endorse the Employee Health Program Code of Conduct, in which they promise not to harm your employees or lie about outcomes. Incredibly, some vendors and other wellness apologists — Wellsteps, Optum, Michael O’Donnell of the American Journal of Health Promotion  — are opposing it.

What if we here at TheySaidWhat are the ones who are lying?

Doesn’t happen. We are in the “integrity segment” of the wellness industry. However, if you are a vendor and find a material mistake in our write-up that we won’t correct upon request and reasonable demonstration that we goofed, you may collect $20,000 from us if an arbitrator from the American Arbitration Association agrees with you, arbitration to be held in Boston.  You need only post an escrow of $10,000 as a “nuisance fee” for wasting our time in arbitration once the arbitrator finds in our favor, as he or she inevitably will.

So as it stands every material statement on this website — more than 250,000 words — is accurate or at least has never been brought to our attention as being inaccurate.

Further, the perps in this industry know they’re the ones who are lying. That’s why they’ve never claimed our $2-million reward offer for showing wellness saves money.

So there are a total of three ways that a vendor can make money from this site?

Yes, $1000 for admitting error, $20,000 if they can show we were wrong, and of course the $2-million reward for showing wellness saves money.

Who is financing this?

Well, no one is “financing” this in the sense that no one has ever collected any money from us.

Also, we have a number of highly ethical clients who do not like what is going on in this industry.  The vendors who are our clients don’t like competing with these perpetrators, and our employer clients don’t like being taken advantage of by them.  We maintain this site as a service for them.  Occasionally someone will pay us to be removed, and we also pick up some new clients, and lots of book sales.

We also do forensic consulting and litigation support for companies that believe their vendor snookered them. The perps cave in about 10 minutes. So we’ve started charging per-case instead of per-hour.

Aren’t you afraid your targets are going to sue?

Sadly, I’m afraid they are not going to sue.

I’ve invited them to sue on many occasions but so far without success, for reasons that will become obvious if you read enough of these postings. For all their bluster and name-calling, they know they can’t win. I have way too much hard evidence against them, and do my own cross, a skill I learned in Harvard Law School’s moot court competition and have more recently honed during forensic reviews and expert witness work.

Has anyone ever actually asked any of these FAQs?

Amazingly, about half of these are real FAQs.