Quackery Then and Now [View all]

[HuckleB]

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/quackery-then-and-now/

“The forces of graft and unrighteousness are peculiar to no country or clime, and they have their champions in the high places and the low. Until the people themselves are better educated concerning the danger and iniquity of quackery, they must be protected from the forces that prey. The popular understanding of these matters is becoming better every day, and, aided by proper laws, the time will come, perhaps, when quackery will be unprofitable.”

The above quote is from a recently published JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) article. I should say that it is republished, because it first appeared on June 8, 1912. The brief article outlines the issues surrounding the regulation of medical practice so as to protect the public from “quackery.” It is interesting to see that the issues faced 100 years ago are virtually identical (in broad brush strokes) to those we face today. Despite the fact that so much has changed in medicine over the last century, in this regard very little has changed.

To put this article into historical context, it was published just two years after the Flexner Report, generally recognized as the turning point in American and Canadian medical education when it truly embraced scientific and evidence-based practices. Mainstream medicine in 1912 was barely making the transition from being based upon tradition and authority to having scientific backing and genuine standards. Life expectancy in the US had just passed 50, up from a low of around 40 thirty years earlier. Phrenology was still practiced by mainstream psychiatrists and neurologists – although it was on the way out (having recently been refuted by scientific studies) and was increasingly being pushed to the fringe. The last purely homeopathic medical school in the US would not close until 1920. Patent medicines were still the norm, and the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act had only recently been enacted to establish some standards of safety in the medicine marketplace (this would essentially transform into the FDA in 1930).

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In other words, the control of quackery is a matter of public education and effective regulation. That, in a nutshell, is exactly the agenda of Science-Based Medicine, the Institute for Science in Medicine, and other organizations dedicated today to opposing pseudoscience and quackery in health care. Our perspective tends to exist in a temporal bubble – we think that the conflicts of today are unique to us, and that we innovated the ideas we use to defend our causes. History, however, tells a different story. The conflict between reasonable standards in medicine and quackery is as old as medicine. It is no wonder that the notion of “eternal recurrence” is so common in literature and popular culture, from Peter Pan to Battlestar Galactica: “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.”


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I know this will disliked by many, but the scientific process is quite democratic, and it's time to let it win out over propaganda.