Medicine: Quackery Up to Date

The U.S. 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 on worthless treatments.

Such mournful numbers have brought the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration, often at loggerheads, into partnership. Meeting at a national congress on medical quackery in Washington, D.C., A.M.A. President Leonard W. Larson (TIME cover, July 7) and Health Secretary Abraham A. Ribicoff agreed that the public is vulnerable largely because it believes that quackery went out with the river boats and snake-oil peddlers, that it can’t happen now. Instead, said Ribicoff, extravagant claims of earlier times have given way to “the illustrated brochure, the medicine-show extravaganza to the television commercial.” Among the quacks now under FDA attack, Ribicoff pointed out by way of a modern horrible example, are peddlers of bottled sea water, priced at up to $20 a gallon, as a “preventive and panacea for virtually all human ailments.”

Placenta & Plankton. FDA Commissioner George P. Larrick singled out one large area of fraud: “There is extensive, big-time quackery in the cosmetics field, generally based on the exploitation of some ‘miracle’ ingredient that is supposed to restore youth and beauty to the unattractive or aging skin.” Sample miracle workers: “human placenta residues, plankton from the water of a certain spring in France, pig skin extract, shark oil and orchid pollen.”

Another rich field for quackery is gadgets, and the FDA had a rogues’ gallery of them from court cases it has recently won. The “Ortho-Structurometer,” a posture adjuster, was falsely claimed to be effective for tuberculosis, asthma, heart conditions and ear-nose-throat infections. A San Francisco outfit got into space-age labeling with the “Oscilloclast,” “Oscillotron,” “Dipolaray” and “Depolatron.” A Southern California chiropractor achieved the ultimate in low fidelity by distributing an endless-tape recording of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. The machine emitted no music, but the promoter claimed that vibrations, transmitted through electrodes, cured cancer as well as cataracts and ulcers. He sold several hundred before he went to jail.

To Cure the Cure. Proposals offered to cure false cures:

> Impoundment of quack remedies offered through the mails. Postmaster General J. Edward Day said he was planning to use this attack on a medical fraud when he is confident his case is so strong that the courts will uphold him.

>Authority for the Federal Trade Commission, watchdog of advertising, to issue restraining orders directly instead of having to go through the courts.

> Examination by the FCC of radio and TV license renewal applications, to see whether stations are encouraging health-food quackery by “nutrition commentators” with an advertising tie-in.

For its part, the medical profession itself has to shoulder some of the blame. Licensed M.D.s have written recent books promoting quack remedies. Several M.D.s were among the promoters of the seawater panaceas. And, Commissioner Larrick pointed out, there is always “the professional research quack—the M.D. who specializes in arranging for ‘tailored studies’ ” of questionable cures—in a word, “rigged research.”