S2 Ep 2 - The Strange and True History of Combating Health Fraud in America: Why and How the Boundaries of Orthodox and Unorthodox Medicine were Established with Guest Historian Dr. Eric Boyle

In this episode, I turn to history to find out why and how selective types of healthcare become mainstream.

Do you ever wonder how some medicines are acceptable and other medicines are alternative or fringe? Who made these decisions and how did we get here? What does this have to do with your access to good healthcare and your ability to care for yourself?

Everything.

What Makes Medicine Mainstream?

There’s plenty of health fraud to go around since humans first tried to heal other people. In fact, health fraud was hard to manage even before the internet. Now that we live with more information than anyone could ever digest in a lifetime, it’s much harder to know what is truly good for us.

Starting with the industrial revolution, healthcare converted to a commodity. Towns and cities grew larger and when the care of the sick changed from families (the home) to professionals and institutions. Several individuals and companies tried to sell “snake oil” remedies and cures. Medical care needed to be standardized to a large extent for public safety and to make sure a drug or a nondrug treatment worked. But, casting a wide net to fight health fraud potentially limited access to good medical care that was not labeled as mainstream medicine.

My guest and historian, Dr. Eric Boyle, shares his research on the history of trying to control health fraud, also known as quack medicine. The title of his book is Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America. He reviews the attempts to eliminate health fraud while exposing the strengths and weaknesses of managing healthcare in the medical marketplace.

I confess that I first judged this book by its cover. I grew up in a household with an integrative doctor who practiced both traditional and nontraditional medicine. I heard some doctors, who never studied Chinese medicine, judge this type of medicine as quackery. I also trained in two models of medicine to be a doctor, and one model was acupuncture.

But Dr. Boyle’s research opened my eyes to how we are influenced to judge medical models that are not mainstream like acupuncture, osteopathy, naturopathy, and chiropractic medicine. He said, “I’ve always thought of myself as a little bit of a medical agnostic...I'm always fascinated by the way that people's world views unavoidably, in ways that people don't really understand, end up shaping their approach to medicine and how they think about medicine.”

Read the Full Show Notes and Transcript on my Website

In this episode, Dr Eric Boyle and I discuss:

• definition of quack medicine, or health fraud
• how boundaries between orthodox and unorthodox medicine were established
• reasons for sectarian (nontraditional) medical groups forming in the 1820s as a response to “heroic” medicine
• combative relationships between different medical groups like traditional physicians, osteopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths
• anti-quackery operation launched by the American Medical Association and the reasons for their efforts (protect the public, political and economic gains)
• self-reliance for one’s health and how it’s changed over time
• the challenges in combating quackery in the twentieth century

Resources

For more information on the topic of quackery in 20th-century American healthcare, read: Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America by Eric Boyle

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