Word: quack
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rest is a pilgrimage. Dragging his mother from place to place, from treatment to treatment, quack to quack. Everyone phoned with a miracle cure. His mother implored: "Why don't you let me die?" And Koch: "Oh, Mama, you're silly. You're not going to die." Then the astonishment: "She died to the day, three months; that is what is so incredible...
Enthusiasts claim that DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) is a remedy for everything from acne to mental retardation. Critics denounce the substance as a quack cure unsupported by scientific studies. Now though, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions have documented that DMSO can exert a powerful effect on the immune system, suggesting that it might one day be helpful in treating rheumatoid arthritis and other immune-system diseases...
...flutter of duets and trios and sprightly choral spectacles, the rejected Nemorino turns for help to the traveling doctor Dulcamara. This quintessential quack provides him with the magical "elixir of love" (A bottle of Bordeaux) which will transfix Adina's attentions. Adina and Belcore prepare for a gala wedding, and Nemorino sells himself into the army to buy the elixir, and his rich uncle dies, and the elixir works or maybe it doesn't, and brightly garbed townspeople dance and sing about wine and romance...
...even though he's heard all that before, Fadden doesn't take it very seriously. "I'm no magician," he laughs, "I'm the only self-confessed quack who works for Harvard." And then he laughs some more...
...approval of the drug and a segment on the TV show 60 Minutes have put DMSO back in the spotlight and renewed the controversy over its effectiveness. Is DMSO, as its supporters stubbornly claim, "the aspirin of the 21st century"? Or is it, as its detractors insist, merely a quack drug, "another Laetrile...