Medical Quackery Guide: Part 3 - Snake Oil is the Medicine of a Quack

False drug and dietary supplement marketing, and inaccurate pharmaceutical treatment and cure claims are colloquially known as snake oil.

Snake oil is a term that originated from intoxicant, poison, and drug-laced patent medicines and the fraudulent marketing of actual snake oil, which is high in essential fatty acids. The quackery method of a travelling doctor or a fraudster would use snake oil as a cure all, which might not have really been snake oil, but mineral oil and beef fat.

Native American herbalism was used for marketing fraudulent quack medicine cure-alls when physicians and fraudsters appropriated their herbal remedies for travelling shows and exhibitions.

People would sell quack medicine at corner pharmacies for the treatment of diseases and health-related conditions, often put recreational drugs in wine and soda, while deceptively marketing them wrongly as tonics for building up health.

The recreational use of drugs and intoxicants, like tobacco, were wrongly promoted by physicians and fraudsters as healthy treatments and tonics, were actually causing physical, emotional, and mental impairment for mistaken views of wellness and/or false feelings of well-being (e.g. excitation, pain relief, and getting "high".)

Medical quacks promote, drug manufacturers produce and distribute, and fraudsters spike oils, lace cosmetics, and deceptively market dietary supplements and medicinal remedies with intoxicants, drugs, and/or make unreasonable weight-loss or disease treatment claims. This is done so as to give the impression of well-being when consumed, but instead has no health benefits (e.g. for pain relief, to get high, and to perk up a lethargic person showing poor health, instead of giving proper advice on nutrition and supplementation).

Quack doctors, medical schools, and institutions will participate in extensive studies and trials of nutrients and herbs in their seeking of the false and elusive holy-grail of snake oil quack medicine to prevent and treat health-related conditions, infections, and diseases, while always failing to show any statistical relevance for efficacy, as required, in all populations.

Quacks will use such clearly evident evidence-based pseudo-science possibilities and links to draw irrelevant conclusions concerning nutrient supplementation. Quacks will advise how to take nutrients while using insufficient evidence, lacking scientific deduction, and misguided disease and health-condition treatment and prevention conclusions; yet nutrients are not snake oil drugs that treat, prevent, manage, or cure diseases and health-related conditions.

Journalists recommend and academic organizations promote medical quacks unethically selling snake oil medicine with supplements in a conflict of interest to their medical licensure. Quack doctors are known to injure patients with their unknowledgeable use and wrongful prescription of supplements. Journalists and quacks will then falsely promote the wrong idea that supplements are lethal, rather than correctly understanding the inherent lethality of drugs and their side effects.