HARRIET HALL

[ REALITY IS THE BEST MEDICINE

Harriet Hall, MD, also known as “The SkepDoc,” is a retired family physician, a CSI fellow, and an editor of the Science-Based Medicine blog. Her website is www.skepdoc.info.

We are pleased to introduce here a new regular column by Skeptical inquirer contributing editor and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Fellow Harriet Hall, MD, well known and respected for her incisive writings on pseudoscience and pseudomedicine. She has titled her column “Reality Is the Best Medicine.” —Editors

The status of women in our society continues to improve. As the cigarette commercial says, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Indeed, it seems we now have Equal Opportunity Quackery.

Sex sells. It’s always been a popular target for quackery, but the quackery used to be directed mainly at men. In the early twentieth century, Dr. John Brinkley made a lot of money promising to rejuvenate men by surgically implanting goat testicles into their scrotums. In addition to restoring their sexual potency, he claimed his treatments worked wonders on twenty-seven different ailments from emphysema to flatulence with a 95 percent success rate. His story is told in the entertaining book Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock.

More recently, we have seen our inboxes spammed with offers to enlarge penises and to cure erectile dysfunction with natural remedies without prescription drugs. Some of those remedies work … but only because they are illegally adulterated with prescription drugs! There were occasional offers aimed at women; for instance, claiming to enlarge their breasts with massage, exercise, and herbal supplements. Breasts are pretty obvious, so they were a natural target. Vaginas were a less obvious target: hidden from sight and not as socially acceptable as a topic of conversation. But lately it seems that vaginal quackery abounds.