Americans Fell for a Theranos-Style Scam 100 Years Ago. Will We Ever Learn?
The huckster understands what people want – an easy route to good health -- and figures out just how to provide it as long as no one asks too many questions.
"Americans are very much prone to this sort of thinking: Give me a pill or give me a magical bean that can make me lose weight!"
The keys to success: Hoopla, fancy technology, and gullibility. And oh yes, one more thing: a blood sample. Well, lots and lots of blood samples. Every testing fee counts.
Sound familiar? It could be the story of the preternaturally persuasive Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos who stands accused of perpetrating a massive blood-testing fraud. But this is a different story from a different time, one that dates back 100 years but sounds almost like it could unfold on the front page of The Wall Street Journal today.
The main difference: Back then, watchdogs thought they'd be able to vanquish fake medicine and scam science. Fat chance, it turned out. It seems like we're more likely to lose-weight-quick than make much of a dent into quackery and health fraud.
Why? Have we learned anything at all over the past century? As we sweep into a new decade, experts says we're not as advanced as we'd like to think. But the fight against fraud and fakery continues.
Quackery: As American As America Itself
In the 17th century, British healers of questionable reputation got a new name -- "quack," from the Dutch word "quacksalver," which originally referred to someone who treats others with home remedies but developed a new meaning along the lines of "charlatan." And these quacks got a new place to sell their wares: the American colonies.
By 1692, a Boston newspaper advertised a patent medicine that promised to cure "the Griping of the Guts, and the Wind Cholick" and – for good measure – "preventeth that woeful Distemper of the Dry Belly Ach." A couple centuries later, the most famous woman in the United States wasn't a first lady or feminist but a hawker of nostrums named Lydia Estes Pinkham whose "vegetable compound" promised to banish "female complaints." One advertisement suggested that the "sure cure" would have saved the life of a Connecticut clergyman whose wife killed him after suffering from feminine maladies for 16 years.
By the early 20th century, Americans were fascinated by electricity and radiation, and both healers and hucksters embraced the new high-tech era. Men with flagging libidos, for example, could irradiate their private parts with the radioactive Radiendocrinator or buy battery-powered electric belts equipped with dangling bits to supercharge their, um, dangling bits.
The Rise of the Radio Wave 'Cure'
Enter radionics, the (supposed) science of better health via radio waves. The idea was that "healthy people radiate healthy energy," and sickness could be reversed through diagnosis and re-tuning, write Dr. Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen in their 2017 book "Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything."
Detecting illness and fixing it required machinery -- Dynamizers, Radioclasts and Oscillocasts – that could cost hundreds of dollars each. Thousands of physicians bought them. Fortunately, they could work remotely, for a fee. The worried-and-potentially-unwell just needed to send a blood sample and, of course, a personal check.
Sting operations revealed radionics to be bogus. A skeptic sent a blood sample to one radionics practitioner in Albuquerque who reported back with news of an infected fallopian tube. In fact, the blood sample came from a male guinea pig. As an American Medical Association leader reported, the guinea pig "had shown no female characteristics up to that time, and a postmortem examination yielded no evidence of ladylike attributes."
When Quackery Refused to Yield
The rise of bogus medical technology in the early 20th century spawned a watchdog industry as organizations like the American Medical Association swept into action, said medical historian Eric Boyle, author of 2012's "Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America."
"When quackery was recognized as a major problem, the people who campaigned for its demise were confident that they could get rid of it," he said. "A lot of people believed that increased education, the truths of science, and laws designed to protect consumers would ultimately drive quackery from the marketplace. And then throughout the century, as modern medicine developed, and more effectively treated one disease after another, many observers remained confident in that prediction."
There's a bid to "flood the information highway with truth to turn the storm of fake promotional stuff into a trickle."
But fake medicine persisted as Americans continued their quest to get- healthy-quick… or get-rich-quick by promising to help others to get- healthy-quick. Even radionics refused to die. It's still around in various forms. And, as the Theranos scandal reveals, we're still hoping our blood can offer the keys to longevity and good health.
Why Do We Still Fall for Scams?
In our own era, the Theranos company rose to prominence when founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes convinced journalists and investors that she'd found a way to cheaply test drops of blood for hundreds of conditions. Then it all fell apart, famously, when the world learned that the technology didn't work. The company has folded, and Holmes faces a federal trial on fraud charges this year.
"There were a lot of prominent, very smart people who bought into the myth of Elizabeth Holmes," a former employee told "60 Minutes," even though the blood tests never actually worked as advertised.
Shouldn't "prominent, very smart people" know better? "People are gullible," said Dr. Stephen Barrett, a psychiatrist and leading quack-buster who runs the QuackWatch website. But there's more to the story. According to him, we're uniquely vulnerable as individuals to bogus medicine.
Scam artists specifically pinpoint their target audiences, such as "smart people," desperate people and alienated people, he said.
Smart people, for example, might be overconfident about their ability to detect fraud and fall for bogus medicine. Alienated people may distrust the establishment, whether it's the medical field or government watchdogs, and be more receptive to alternative sources of information.
Dr. Barrett also points a finger at magical thinking, which comes in different forms. It could mean a New Age-style belief that our minds can control the world around us. Or, as professional quack-buster Alex Berezow said, it could refer to "our cultural obsession with quick fixes."
"Americans are very much prone to this sort of thinking: Give me a pill or give me a magical bean that can make me lose weight! But complex problems need complex solutions," said Berezow, a microbiologist who debunks junk science in his job as a spokesman for the American Council on Science & Health.
American mistrust of expertise makes matters worse, he said. "When I tell people they need to get vaccinated, I'm called a shill for the pharmaceutical industry," he said. "If I say dietary supplements generally don't work, I'm a shill for doctors who want to keep people sick."
What can ordinary citizens do to protect themselves from fake medicine? "You have to have a healthy skepticism of everything," Berezow said. "When you come across something new, is someone trying to take advantage of you? It's a horrible way to think about the world, but there's some truth to it."
"Like any chronic disease, we will have to live with it while we do our best to fight it."
The government and experts have their own roles to play via regulation and education, respectively. For all the criticism it gets, the Food & Drug Administration does serve as a bulwark against fakery in prescription medicine. And while celebrities like Gwyneth "Goop" Paltrow hawk countless questionable medical products on the Internet, scientists and physicians are fighting back by using social media as a tool to promote the truth. There's a bid to "flood the information highway with truth to turn the storm of fake promotional stuff into a trickle," said Dr. Randi Hutter Epstein, a writer in residence at Yale School of Medicine and author of 2018's "Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything."
What's next? Like death, taxes and Cher, charlatans are likely to always be with us. Boyle quoted the late William Jarvis, a pioneering quack-buster in the late 20th century who believed health fraud would never be eradicated: "Like any chronic disease, we will have to live with it while we do our best to fight it."
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.
With a deadly pandemic sweeping the planet, many are questioning the comfort and security we have taken for granted in the modern world.
A century ago, when an influenza pandemic struck, we barely knew what viruses were.
More than a century after the germ theory, we are still at the mercy of a microbe we can neither treat, nor control, nor immunize against. Even more discouraging is that technology has in some ways exacerbated the problem: cars and air travel allow a new disease to quickly encompass the globe.
Some say we have grown complacent, that we falsely assume the triumphs of the past ensure a happy and prosperous future, that we are oblivious to the possibility of unpredictable "black swan" events that could cause our destruction. Some have begun to lose confidence in progress itself, and despair of the future.
But the new coronavirus should not defeat our spirit—if anything, it should spur us to redouble our efforts, both in the science and technology of medicine, and more broadly in the advance of industry. Because the best way to protect ourselves against future disasters is more progress, faster.
Science and technology have overall made us much better able to deal with disease. In the developed world, we have already tamed most categories of infectious disease. Most bacterial infections, such as tuberculosis or bacterial pneumonia, are cured with antibiotics. Waterborne diseases such as cholera are eliminated through sanitation; insect-borne ones such as malaria through pest control. Those that are not contagious until symptoms appear, such as SARS, can be handled through case isolation and contact tracing. For the rest, such as smallpox, polio, and measles, we develop vaccines, given enough time. COVID-19 could start a pandemic only because it fits a narrow category: a new, viral disease that is highly contagious via pre-symptomatic droplet/aerosol transmission, and that has a high mortality rate compared to seasonal influenza.
A century ago, when an influenza pandemic struck, we barely knew what viruses were; no one had ever seen one. Today we know what COVID-19 is down to its exact genome; in fact, we have sequenced thousands of COVID-19 genomes, and can track its history and its spread through their mutations. We can create vaccines faster today, too: where we once developed them in live animals, we now use cell cultures; where we once had to weaken or inactivate the virus itself, we can now produce vaccines based on the virus's proteins. And even though we don't yet have a treatment, the last century-plus of pharmaceutical research has given us a vast catalog of candidate drugs, already proven safe. Even now, over 50 candidate vaccines and almost 100 candidate treatments are in the research pipeline.
It's not just our knowledge that has advanced, but our methods. When smallpox raged in the 1700s, even the idea of calculating a case-fatality rate was an innovation. When the polio vaccine was trialled in the 1950s, the use of placebo-controlled trials was still controversial. The crucial measure of contagiousness, "R0", was not developed in epidemiology until the 1980s. And today, all of these methods are made orders of magnitude faster and more powerful by statistical and data visualization software.
If you're seeking to avoid COVID-19, the hand sanitizer gel you carry in a pocket or purse did not exist until the 1960s. If you start to show symptoms, the pulse oximeter that tests your blood oxygenation was not developed until the 1970s. If your case worsens, the mechanical ventilator that keeps you alive was invented in the 1950s—in fact, no form of artificial respiration was widely available until the "iron lung" used to treat polio patients in the 1930s. Even the modern emergency medical system did not exist until recently: if during the 1918 flu pandemic you became seriously ill, there was no 911 hotline to call, and any ambulance that showed up would likely have been a modified van or hearse, with no equipment or trained staff.
As many of us "shelter in place", we are far more able to communicate and collaborate, to maintain some semblance of normal life, than we ever would have been. To compare again to 1918: long-distance telephone service barely existed at that time, and only about a third of homes in the US even had electricity; now we can videoconference over Zoom and Skype. And the enormous selection and availability provided by online retail and food delivery have kept us stocked and fed, even when we don't want to venture out to the store.
Let the virus push us to redouble our efforts to make scientific, technological, and industrial progress on all fronts.
"Black swan" calamities can strike without warning at any time. Indeed, humanity has always been subject to them—drought and frost, fire and flood, war and plague. But we are better equipped now to deal with them than ever before. And the more progress we make, the better prepared we'll be for the next one. The accumulation of knowledge, technology, industrial infrastructure, and surplus wealth is the best buffer against any shock—whether a viral pandemic, a nuclear war, or an asteroid impact. In fact, the more worried we are about future crises, the more energetically we should accelerate science, technology and industry.
In this sense, we have grown complacent. We take the modern world for granted, so much so that some question whether further progress is even still needed. The new virus proves how much we do need it, and how far we still have to go. Imagine how different things would be if we had broad-spectrum antiviral drugs, or a way to enhance the immune system to react faster to infection, or a way to detect infection even before symptoms appear. These technologies may seem to belong to a Star Trek future—but so, at one time, did cell phones.
The virus reminds us that nature is indifferent to us, leaving us to fend entirely for ourselves. As we go to war against it, let us not take the need for such a war as reason for despair. Instead, let it push us to redouble our efforts to make scientific, technological, and industrial progress on all fronts. No matter the odds, applied intelligence is our best weapon against disaster.