If It Sounds Like A Quack: A Journey to the Fringes of American Medicine
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
Public Affairs Books
Copyright 2023 by the author

It starts out innocently enough. Maybe you see the rare occasion when an old “folk remedy” actually works. Or the lifestyle changes you promote (usually diet and exercise) along with your treatment help the patient heal themselves while your treatment does nothing. Or maybe it’s just the placebo effect. In any case, the end result is the one you hoped for. So you become convinced that you have the One True Cure that can fix all the things that ail people. You go into business promoting and selling it, and an understaffed FDA (and other government agencies) can’t get out of the way of its own bureaucracy fast enough to stop you.

Word spreads, and people dissatisfied with the current health care industry (which often seems more concerned about profits than patient care) buy your One True Cure. What can go wrong, especially now that the money is coming in?

Multiply this by the Internet which gives everyone both a platform to hawk their wares and a way to find out about these “treatments”, health care “deserts” in rural and poor regions that push people to seek out cheaper alternative treatments, and a political party that encourages “individual freedom” over the needs of the society as a whole, and you’ve got a story that, in the hands of Hongoltz-Hetling, is both funny and infuriating.

He chooses an interesting structure for this book. Rather than follow the general progress of the One True Cures and pointing out examples along the way, or giving each “case study” its own chapter where we follow it from the original idea all the way through to its end, he decided on a fusion of both. The first section introduces us to the people behind his chosen “case studies”, and what brought them to consider their One True Cure. In the next section, we see them developing their ideas and bringing them to market….

This method humanizes his subjects; they start out with good intentions and don’t really plan on becoming frauds and hucksters. You can almost sympathize with them – almost. Especially those who find that their One True Cure gets an official “OK to use” in very limited situations (at least until we figure out the science behind it, and don’t need their methodology anymore), or jump through the hoops to get the “Safe to use” label – and then have to deal with scammers and knockoffs copying them.

A final part in each section covers things in general – how bogus cures grew and spread, and the attempts to squash them. And how all the efforts came to naught when a former game show host became president* and how he encouraged people to ditch regular medical care and treatments – the ones that worked – in favor of junk that actually harmed people.

* Interestingly, Hongoltz-Hetling never refers to Trump by name….

By the time Hongoltz-Hetling wraps it up, all the threads have come together (the platform of the Internet where any conspiracy theory can find a home, a political party actively hostile to the federal government, and an increasingly profit-driven health care system that’s forcing too many people to seek out cheaper alternative treatments) to bring us to the current situation where people truly believe that vaccines are inserting microchips into people, that, when activated by the government, will turn the vaccinated into zombies.

It would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.