Quack, Quack.

[Guest guest]

http://www.doctoryourself.com/quackquack.html

 

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

(Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz)

 

Some quacks are so famous that their names have become generic, as Kleenex is

for facial tissues (when is the last time someone asked you for a " facial

tissue? " ). To this day in Australia, people talk of Hoovering the carpet. And

worldwide, Mesmerism is the term of choice to describe a nut who has persuaded

the sick and gullible to try wacky and useless nostrums. Franz Anton Mesmer was

a real person, and by some accounts quite a gifted healer, who lived some two

hundred years ago. He may have been the first really successful clinical

hypnotherapist. He certainly made a name for himself and a good living to boot

from his " specialty, " which the great musical satirist Tom Lehrer would call

" diseases of the rich. "

Two questions must be asked of his methods, and the methods of all quacks, and

indeed the methods of all physicians: are they safe, and are they effective?

Mesmer is not known to have killed anybody. Well, maybe he diverted people away

from scientific medicine and harmed them in so doing. But were medical doctors

any better? Arguably they were worse, perhaps much worse. Remember that around

this time of Voltaire and George Washington, doctors did not even wash their

hands between patients. They would go from lancing a boil to delivering a baby

and from dissecting a rotting cadaver to doing crude cataract surgery with no

anesthetic. Doctors would not wash their hands for another century and even

then obstetrician Ignaz Samuelveiss, M.D., lost his reputation, his career, and

his sanity in a failed battle to convince a stubborn, arrogant and barbaric

profession of well-educated physicians that they were actually spreading disease

more than they were curing it.

When we look at what the regular, fully educated doctors were offering

(bleeding with dirty lancets and pond leeches, for example) Mesmer doesn't look

all that bad. Doctors of the eighteenth century used outhouses like everyone

else, and certainly no less often, and none of them washed their hands before

surgery or between patients. Even today, half of all physicians surveyed don't

wash their hands after using the toilet. I'll bet you'd love a reference for

that statistic, because you don't believe it. Of course you can research it at

your library and see for yourself. While you are at it, hunt this one down:

there have been over one million accidental hypodermic needle pricks each year

in the United States. It is believed that fewer than a third are reported, so

that makes possibly three million or more, says the Centers for Disease Control.

(Okay, okay: USA Weekend, April 8-10, 1994). In an age of AIDS and hepatitis,

this is the carelessness that quack legend is made from. Yet all these are

certified medical professionals: the phlebotomists, nurses, and doctors.

Back to the past again, to the time of Mesmer. One of the common remedies of

the 18th and 19th centuries was mercury. Mercury is well known today to be a

toxic heavy metal, the very vapors of which are dangerous. Any junior high

science teacher knows this, and has in her lab classroom a mercury clean-up kit,

for immediate, safe isolation of any spill, no matter how small. No longer will

my grade-school friends and I be allowed to play with " quicksilver, " mercury's

common name. No longer may anyone roll the heavy, cold, shiny liquid about in

their hands and try to coat pennies with it. It is too dangerous.

Yet in the not too far past, mercury, often as the drug calomel, was

administered to countless innocent and trusting patients, not by Mesmer or any

other oddball, but by the family doctor. Well, we can dismiss the dark ages of

medicine as over and done with, right? Wrong. Mercury, making up over half of

a so-called " silver " amalgam dental filling, is still placed into the living

bone tissue of adults and children, where it may well stay, 24 hours a day, 7

days a week, for ten years of more. Some of my mercury amalgam fillings lasted

me from childhood into fatherhood. If a science teacher encouraged a 13 year

old put mercury into his mouth, it would be gross negligence, bordering on

criminal. Dentists do it every day.

Who, then, are the quacks?

Moving into the mid 19th century, we run into entire flocks of medical wackos.

In this age of free-market anything, prescribed medicines and patent remedies

shared a common feature: they were poisons. Along comes a series of

surprisingly well educated medical doctors who rebelled against their own

profession by recommending vegetarianism, fasting, water and sunlight, and,

gasp, even exercise to cure the many diseases of the day. Whether it was James

Calab Jackson, MD, of Dansville, NY's " Home on the Hill " spa, or the much better

known John Harvey Kellogg, MD of Battle Creek and cereal fame, these quacks were

neither fleecing nor killing their patients. Following the cardinal rule of

healing, " First do no harm, " the naturopathic branch of health science was far

ahead of its time in many ways. For instance, " Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman " would

have had to be a naturopath, for no drug school would even accept a woman as a

student in her day. The nature-cure schools did, graduating the first female

American physicians in history.

All these women were quacks, of course, because they advocated fasting, water

cures, sunlight, exercise and good diet. You will learn of them in detail in

The Greatest Health Discovery, by the American Natural Hygiene Society.

There are two dramas about medicine that you will never see produced on

Broadway or made into TV movies. One is Dr. Jack Kevorkian's satire of

hospitals' mistakes, and the other is The Doctor's Dilemma, by no less than one

of the most distinguished playwrights since Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw.

Shaw observes that quacks and regular doctors are about equally dangerous and

equally effective, and probably equally useless. It is in Shaw's prefaces to

his plays, more than the plays themselves, that one often learns the most about

the man and his ideas. The prefaces are not performance material, but the

preface to The Doctor's Dilemma will hold your attention just fine.

Far more scathing attacks on modern medicine's dangers will be found in

Confessions of a Medical Heretic, by Robert Mendelssohn, MD, Medical Nemesis, by

Ivan Illich, and Who Is Your Doctor and Why, by Alonzo Shadman, MD. Most people

will never read these books, as they are too disturbing. I have an entire

family full of doctor-worshippers. Perhaps you do, too. Doctors command far

more respect than they've earned. It amounts to a religion, almost a perverse

opposite of Christian Science, when we have so much faith in people. Odd

thought though it may be, consider that you may well be born without being

baptized, and die without seeing a rabbi or priest. But you will not even exist

as a human being until some doctor signs your birth certificate, and you are not

free from the IRS until some doctor signs your death certificate.

Between these events, doctors enjoy high incomes, high social status and

immense authority. Like priests, says Dr. Mendelshonn. Ralph Nader, the

nation's foremost consumer advocate, thinks that the medical profession kills

nearly 300,000 Americans each year. Even if Nader exaggerates by an extremely

improbable 95%, that's a horrible number of funerals caused by physicians.

Napoleon said that in the next world, doctors would have more deaths to account

for than generals. Author, endocrinologist and ayurvedic physician Deepak

Chopra, MD, has said that more people live off cancer than die from it.

Grit your teeth as you read that, or toss this book into the dumpster. It

doesn't matter to me. When ready, the books I referred to above will still be

in your library system, somewhere, waiting on the shelves for you to get them

out by interlibrary loan.

It is easy for Hollywood to put together a fictional film (bordering on the

libelous) such as The Road to Wellsville, which makes a mockery of Dr. Harvey

Kellogg. Television presents us with many doctor soap operas and

prime-time-wasting doctor shows such as ER. Invariably, these politically

correct programs show as little of the realities of medical practice as An

Officer and a Gentleman or Top Gun show about real life in the Navy. Doctors

are wonderful, wounded warriors, we are to believe, battling against the twin

evils of ignorance and frequent commercial breaks.

The fact that so many of those commercials are for patent medicines would lead

a skeptic to suspect conflict of interest. After all, if you were a

pharmaceutical company, spending more on advertising that you do on research,

would you sponsor any part of an anti-doctor show? This explains why a Learning

Channel expose on Mesmer would be easy to produce and sell. When is the last

time you saw a favorable news account, anywhere, in any media, about quacks?

Of course, it's in the name itself. " Quack " is a condemnatory word. Even

eye-witnessed murderers are called " suspects " well into the legal process.

" Quacks, " by definition, cannot be good. Even witches, a familiar childhood

symbol of evil, are cut more slack: " Are you a good witch, or a bad witch? "

Dorothy was asked. No one has ever asked me, " Are you a good quack, or a bad

quack? "

There have been an embarrassingly large number of " good " quacks, even in recent

medically-dominated history. It is not easy to be the small mammal in the Age

of Doctorsaurs, but a persistent minority, generally medical doctors themselves,

have rebelled against their own training.

Copyright C 1999 and prior years Andrew W. Saul. From the books QUACK DOCTOR

and PAPERBACK CLINIC, available from Dr. Andrew Saul, Number 8 Van Buren

Street, Holley, New York 14470.

 

 

 

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[Guest guest]

-

" Frank " <califpacific

<gettingwell >

Thursday, December 19, 2002 4:13 AM

Quack, Quack.

 

 

>

> http://www.doctoryourself.com/quackquack.html

>

> Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

> (Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz)

>

> Some quacks are so famous that their names have become generic, as

Kleenex is for facial tissues (when is the last time someone asked

you for a " facial tissue? " ). To this day in Australia, people talk

of Hoovering the carpet. And worldwide, Mesmerism is the term of

choice to describe a nut who has persuaded the sick and gullible to

try wacky and useless nostrums. Franz Anton Mesmer was a real

person, and by some accounts quite a gifted healer, who lived some

two hundred years ago. He may have been the first really successful

clinical hypnotherapist. He certainly made a name for himself and a

good living to boot from his " specialty, " which the great musical

satirist Tom Lehrer would call " diseases of the rich. "

 

<snip>

 

Good essay! The one thing Doctor Saul does not mention is

that the term Quack is, in itself, very Orwellian double-speak. Quack

is a name originally bestowed upon allopaths because they dispensed

dangerous Mercury to patients. The word Quack is very similar to the

word for Mercury in Germany where the term originated.

 

Alobar