Quackery

Abstract: Part 1 Interested parties and the background to the controversy: charting the terrain - introducing vitamin C, the battle field, the treatment of cancer, national differences in medical organization and practice, cancer clinical trials the vitamin C "believers" - Linus Pauling, Ewan Cameron, the Linus Pauling Institute, the Robinson affair, megavitamin therapy and orthomolecular medicine, the holistic health movement and the "freedom fighters" for freedom of choice in cancer treatments, the health food industry the vitamin C "non-believers" - Dr Charles Moertel, the Cancer Establishment, the National Cancer Institute, the food and drug administration, the American Cancer Society, orthodox nutritionists, "quackbusters", and the fight against "nutritional quackery", "The New England Journal of Medicine" and the profession of medicine. Part 2 Reconstructing the controversy: the Cameron-Pauling hypothesis and the vale of Leven trials - the Cameron-Pauling hypothesis: vitamin C and PHI, the pilot vale of Leven trials, the PNAS affair, Cameron's pilot trial findings and his presentation strategy, refining the vale of Leven trials, publicity, a time of optimism, the conclusion of the Sloan-Kettering trial the first Mayo clinic trial - Pauling's "head-on collision with the scientific method"? - the first Mayo clinic trial, the second Mayo clinic trial is announced, Pauling, Moertel, and the Laetrile controversy, of mice and men, Cameron's continuing research the second Mayo clinic trial - "a conspiracy to suppress the truth"? - the 2nd Mayo clinic trial, the Pauling-Cameron criticisms, ploys and tactics, the publication game, closing the controversy. Part 3 The politics of therapeutic evaluation: the social shaping of the vitamin C and cancer controversy - the social negotiation of the efficacy of vitamin C as a cancer treatment, more negotiations - the social character of the publication process, fact-making and the media, with a law suit on the side, the importance of rhetoric, the rhetorical deployment and malleability of ethical claims, the centrality of method discourse - its rhetorical and political functions comparative analysis of the controversy - vitamin C, 5-fluorouracil, and interferon - 5-fluorouracil - "The breakthrough that never was" as conventional cancer treatment, the adjudicating community - the profession of medicine, interferon-from "pseudoscience" to professionally accredited cancer treatment. Part 4 Making and creating choices: options and pressures for change, implications of this study for the evaluation and social implementation of therapies.

Abstract: James Harvey Young describes the development of patent medicines in the USA, from the enactment in 1906 of the Pure Food and Drugs Act through the mid-1960s. Many predicted that the Pure Food and Drugs Act would be the end of harmful nostrums, but Young describes post-Act cases involving manufacturers and promoters of such products as Cuforhedake Brane-Fude, a "tuberculosis-curing" liniment and the dangerous weight-reducing pill Marmola. The book describes the brothers Charles Frederick and Peter Kaadt, who treated diabetic patients with a mixture of vinegar and saltpeter; Louisiana state senator Dudley J. LeBlanc, who put on fabulous medicine shows as late as the 1950s promoting Hadacol and his own political career, and Adlophus Hohensee, whose lectures on nutrition provide a classic example of the continuing appeal of food faddism.