Dialogue: Snake-oil 'cures' have been around a long time

By DON DONOVAN*

The latest reports of the efficacy, uselessness or sheer threat of uncontrolled quasi-medicines is nothing but a repetition of the past.

Wild, fringe nostrums have always been with us but their modern birthplace was hucksterist, frontierland America. At best they do no harm but somehow make us feel that we've topped up a deficient system; at worst - typically as implied cancer cures - they lead to shattered hope.

For example, the soothing influence of the Green Mountain Ointment was immediately apparent after application, and in most instances permanent cures of an astonishing variety of ailments were effected. These included ague in the face, swelled breasts, bronchitis, quinsy, croup, felons (a purulent infection at the distal end of the finger), shingles, salt rheum, piles, milk-leg sores, erysipelas and inflammation of the eyes and bowels.

No other ointment in existence was of equal power and it was available in 1850 from Messrs Armstrong and Hurd at 38 Courtlandt St, New York.

At a stroke, it seemed, whole swathes of the medical profession were rendered redundant by that splendid remedy, but the Green Mountain Ointment fell short when it came to cancer - either that or its promoters had missed a trick.

But the good times were coming. Fifty years later, there appeared, in a 1902 copy of The Cosmopolitan, an illustrated monthly magazine, two advertisements offering typical cancer cures.

In the first, Dr W.J.P. Kingsley (also of New York) claimed to have perfected the quickest, easiest, cheapest and most scientific cure whereby even "the largest" cases were cured within a few weeks.

This modest piece of publicity was followed, a few pages later, by an exhortation from Dr Ben-Bye, of Indianopolis, to buy his "soothing, balmy oils" which would cure "cancer or tumour - internal or external."

The Green Mountain Ointment and the remedies of Drs Kingsley and Ben-Bye have sunk without trace, and along with them such other medical "breakthroughs" as the health-jolting chair, Dr Scott's electric corset and Merritt Griffin's Indian salve, a specific for the cure of, among other things, tumours and running sores.

All of those snake-oil era remedies have disappeared for one reason - they didn't work. But no doubt for the brief periods that they offered hope to clutchers at straws, their inventors and touters cleaned up nicely without let or hindrance and moved on to brighter, better, more state-of-the-art rip-off products and marketing techniques.

Of course, there were "cures." The mind does marvellous things and faith can, as the song says, move mountains - even Green Mountains, perhaps.

But those old nostrums were never tested in the rigours of scientific or statistical research and so, when they didn't actually kill, their successes were trumpeted from those recoveries which would probably have happened anyway in the natural course of events.

These days, in the "civilised" world, the conjunction of the desperate sufferer with the "Have-I-got-a-cure-for-you!" medicine man is more closely proscribed by the intervention of a paternal Government authority, and we ordinary lay-people are to some extent protected from exploitation and danger.

But despite that, in modern memory, some things have got through. Remember Milan Brych, the sad-faced little middle-European doctor of the 1970s who caused so much hollow controversy with his secret cancer remedy? How much false hope did he generate before the Government's watchdogs finally shut him down? And how many people might still believe in him?

Remember also Laetrile, wonder cure of the 1980s? Made from apricot kernels - "fresh, chewable and bitter" (for best effect) - it continues to be offered on the internet as a necessity. As a therapy for existing cancer, between 20 and 50 a day are recommended (with scientific precision); or take a mere seven a day for absolute prevention.

For those at their wits' end, the insistence of the administrators of the Medicines Act that new cures be thoroughly tested must be enormously frustrating.

And to we more fortunate onlookers, the earnest Dunedin dentist and his colleagues might appear to be tight-faced tormentors against the pleas of the needy, but they are right to speak up. Only recently, Lyprinol gave false hope to the desperate.

* Don Donovan is an Auckland writer.