If It Sounds Like a Quack...
A Journey to the Fringes of American Medicine
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A Pulitzer Prize finalist's bizarre journalistic journey through the world of fringe medicine, filled with leeches, baking soda IVs, and, according to at least one person, zombies.
It's no secret that American health care has become too costly and politicized to help everyone. So where do you turn if you can't afford doctors, or don't trust them? In this book, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling examines the growing universe of non-traditional treatments -- including some that are really non-traditional.
With costs skyrocketing and anti-science sentiment spreading, the so-called "medical freedom" movement has grown. Now it faces its greatest challenge: going mainstream. In these pages you'll meet medical freedom advocates including an international leech smuggler, a gold miner-turned health drink salesman who may or may not be from the Andromeda galaxy, and a man who says he can turn people into zombies with aerosol spray. One by one, these alternative healers find customers, then expand and influence, always seeking the one thing that would take their businesses to the next level--the support and approval of the government.
Should the government dictate what is medicine and what isn't? Can we have public health when disagreements over science are this profound? No, seriously, can you turn people into flesh-eating zombies? If It Sounds Like a Quack asks these critical questions while telling the story of how we got to this improbable moment, and wondering where we go from here. Buckle up for a bumpy ride...unless you're against seatbelts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this blistering survey, journalist Hongoltz-Hetling (A Libertarian Walks into a Bear) explores the "world of science-lite health care, its origins, and how, between 2000 and 2020, it changed the face of America." In novelistic detail, Hongoltz-Hetling chronicles the lives and careers of nine alternative medicine purveyors, including a failed Montana gubernatorial candidate who tangled with the FDA over supplements he had developed to cure his mother's cancer and a South Dakota dentist who claimed to have invented a laser capable of harnessing "universal healing light" to remedy any ailment. The profiles highlight the individuals' predictable eccentricities (Alicja Kolyszko, a proponent of leeches, goes by "Dr. A-Leech-A"), but the author also excels at teasing out the sometimes tragic undertones: Leilani and Dale Neumann—founders of a Pentecostal ministry and "confident that prayer, not medical science, was the One True Cure"—suffered the death of their 11-year-old daughter from untreated diabetes after prayer failed to save her, leading to the couple's conviction for reckless homicide. By turns humorous, enraging, and heartbreaking, the vivid stories drive home the stakes and consequences of hawking unproven treatments, though it feels like a missed opportunity that Hongoltz-Hetling doesn't address the larger social forces behind the rise of quack medicine. Still, this proves a powerful antidote to medical disinformation.