Word: quack
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...will spend $890 million in 1961 on medical research-and even as it does so, the U.S. public will spend $1 billion for quack remedies and gadgets and dietary health fads. By best estimates, $350 million will go for vitamin supplements, mostly self-prescribed and not needed, and $150 million for equally unnecessary laxatives. While the nation's medical centers spend $111 million seeking causes and cures for cancer, the public will shoot $50 million for quack cancer remedies. With arthritis and rheumatism the comparison is still worse: $6,500,000 for legitimate research, but $250 million wasted...
Snake Slaughter. Though nostrums and quack cures have always been around, they got their big boost in the U.S., says Carson, from the Civil War. The men under arms learned to seek relief in an assortment of pain-killing potions, most of which contained opiates, alcohol or both. Such strong ingredients could kill pain, and that touch of veracity built credibility for a thousand other claims...
...Quack? In Hidalgo, second county upriver from the Gulf, health authorities got state help for a four-year study by anthropologists and sociologists. Last week, in Hidalgo's county seat of Edinburg, the researchers gave their prescription for dealing with curanderismo: "Don't fight it-join it." To the incredulous M.D.s who heard the report, Study Director William Madsen, a University of Texas anthropologist, explained: Mexican-Americans still reject the germ theory of disease and infection; to them, a raw egg has more healing power than an antibiotic, and a hospital is a place...
Still pursued with vigor is the crackdown on quack remedies, now under the Department of Investigation. This office does original investigations, cooperates with federal watchdog agencies, and often provides the evidence to get convictions...
...Roguish World of Dr. Brinkley, by Gerald Carson. A sparkling biography of the quack who became a millionaire with his radio-advertised promise that old men, through goat-gland implants, could become potent old menaces...