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Medical Quackery: The Hazard of Unproven Remedies
| Article
# : |
21952 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
1,928 Words |
| Author
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Alexandra Greeley
Alexandra Greeley was food editor of the South China Morning
Post, Hong Kong, and staff writer for the Time-Life cooking
series "Great Meals in Minutes." |
Joe, a 145-pound accountant, was browsing through his favorite men's magazine when an ad caught his attention. "The Body Maker--Add inches to arms, chest, and thighs. Sculpt abdomen, buttocks, and calves. Safe, adjustable electrical impulses work your body more effectively than regular exercise." Joe received a muscle-growth machine, after he sent a check for $599. After one year of strapping the pads all over his body and giving his muscles electrical impulses, he is no more the envy of his office mates than he was before.
A middle-aged, overweight couple contacted the Religious School of Natural Hygiene in California a few years ago. Arthur Andrews, the director, guaranteed that they would each lose a certain number of pounds in a matter of weeks. Desperate, the couple signed themselves into what seemed to be a legitimate, well-run operation. Andrews put them on a "diet" that consisted of an unsupervised fast, water only, for forty days. At the end of that time, both husband and wife were severely weakened. He recovered, but she now suffers permanent neurological damage. At least six people who attended the "school" have died from starvation, and dozens of others have suffered irreversible damage.
Sadly, Joe and the overweight couple are not isolated cases; they represent a fraction of the trusting consumers defrauded annually. Medical quacks offer devices, plans, and medications that may not only be useless and expensive, but are often dangerous and even fatal. Quackery has become a national crisis and scandal, say the experts, who estimate that Americans spend nearly $26 billion annually on invalid therapies.
Many of today's frauds seem bizarre and outlandish: moon dust to cure arthritis, cosmetic creams or suction cups to expand the bust, light bulbs to cure prostate problems, laetrile clinics to cure cancer (laetrile is derived from apricot pits, which are high in cyanide). And as one fraud is debunked, yet another scheme is hatched.
A puffery, an exaggeration
Just what is a quack? The word derives from the sixteenth-century term Quacksalver, a non medical charlatan who boasts about the power of a cure. Today, the word quack defies such an easy definition, for the term is an umbrella that covers practitioners, products, diagnostics, and belief systems that offer miracle cures for every conceivable state of the human condition--but which are scientifically unproven. William Jarvis, Ph.D., president of the
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