By the time I was done writing my first book, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, which looked at the dynamics between libertarians and bears in a small New England town, I knew my next book, If It Sounds Like a Quack … , would focus on medicine, another topic heavily influenced by those whose philosophy of governance is best described as preferring slim to none.
As it turns out, the libertarian call to deregulate health care, which first gathered steam about 20 years ago, was of immense appeal to those whose brand of health care regularly ran afoul of those pesky regulations. I was soon deep in the extreme fringe of the alternative-health-care movement, a place where the efficacy of a proposed cancer treatment—be it leech, bleach, or laser—was much less important than the right of all Americans to purchase the health treatment of their choice, no matter how silly or potentially injurious.
As I spoke with practitioner after practitioner, their divergent medical views became clear. One man believed that bodily acids were the cause of all disease and could be combated by injecting baking soda into the veins, while another believed that tiny, cancer-causing parasites could be killed by drinking a diluted form of bleach.
And yet I was surprised at just how similar their stories and viewpoints were. Each practitioner developed or discovered what they felt was the One True Cure to all diseases. Each cure was unsupported by accepted medical science, and each person had been thwarted by the government in their efforts to sell their miracle cures to the public. As they hit regulatory roadblocks, each was bolstered by the libertarian-inspired health-freedom movement, which advocated for establishing a level playing field between alternative and evidence-based care by ridding the legal landscape of all regulatory interference. The anti-institutional worldview, coupled with an abandonment of core scientific principles, led One True Cure believers to the extreme right wing of the political spectrum, where over the past 20 years they have espoused ever more outrageous claims about their discoveries.
One man believed that bodily acids were the cause of all disease and could be combated by injecting baking soda into the veins.
It’s not surprising that, over the course of the pandemic, many practitioners claimed that their alternative modalities could cure the coronavirus. What’s surprising is that these healers, once indistinguishable from the American mainstream, have accompanied their health advocacy with wild conspiracy theories. They say they are the subject of assassination attempts by Big Pharma, that the vaccines turn people into zombies, or that the government is in thrall to an evil empire of space aliens who want to keep humans sick.
Another similarity between these practitioners is that their stories often ended in tragedy, for both themselves and their patients. The man who sold lasers on the theory that a “universal healing light” could cure all disease was, at 83 years old, sentenced to a 12-year prison term. The baking-soda advocate convinced a young woman to forgo conventional treatment for her breast cancer, allowing it to metastasize, which has dramatically shortened her life expectancy.
These commonalities convinced me that a fix is possible. The legal system needs to either stop alternative practitioners much earlier in their careers or, even better, harness their energy for good purposes. After all, the core of the events that catapult them toward tragedy is a simple matter of academic disagreement over theories of health.
But right now, America seems to be trending in the opposite direction, toward a political radicalization that forgoes understanding. And that means that the next generation of One True Cures is already in the queue, waiting to wreak havoc on a new crop of hoodwinked patients, and on themselves.
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s If It Sounds Like a Quack … : A Journey to the Fringes of American Medicine is out now from PublicAffairs
