Customer Reviews

The Health Robbers: A Close Look at Quackery in America (Consumer Health Library)

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Look, you don't have to be a medical export, or a scientist, to understand what science is. Science is nothing more than the study of nature!

Scientific method: Experiment. Observe. Eliminate as many variables that may affect the results as possible. Study ALL results, expected and non-expected. Share ALL results with peers, who challenge your results by conducting independent experiments and observations to verify. Hypothesize based on the FULL body of verified results. Repeat.

Scientific method has yielded an astounding bounty of discoveries in the short amount of time since it has started to be widely practiced.

True modern medicine is just applying scientific method to the act of healing people. This method has enabled human life to overcome and endure many diseases on a scale unimagined just 175 years ago, when medicine was largely a hunch-based-on-anecdotes practice.

Are there bad practices and practitioners in modern medicine? Of course there are, as there are in any human endeavor, especially when so much money is at stake. But science and the foundations of modern medicine are not to blame for this. Modern medicine is there to serve you -- you just need to steer clear of bad practice and practitioners as best you can.

Turning to those who have abandoned science, never embraced it in the first place, and/or found they could make a lucrative living by taking a stand against it, is an enourmous gamble. Pointless at best, it is possibly harmful to your health, especially if you have a genuine health concern that is not self-healing and that requires truly effective therapies to provide a better outcome.

People can fool us into feeling things or believing things that have been repeatedly scientifically debunked. Sadly, nobody is better at fooling us then ourselves. That is the nature of self-awareness; we are no longer unbiased observers, especially when it comes to our own selves, which is why pseudo-science thrives in the alternative "health and well-being" industry. But, to paraphrase Richard Feynman, "nature cannot be fooled".

Read this book for a very educational look into the nature of the deceptions that accompany most alternative therapies. You may not believe it now, but this knowledge WILL bring you closer to nature, which is, by the way, just another word for reality.

I really enjoyed this book. It taught me much about why and how different types of scams are perpetrated by different types of alternative medicine huxters. It was very objectively written, with opinions that were backed up with excellent references. A great book to survey all forms of health quackery currently being hawked to the public.

This book is a needed antidote to the thousands of hucksters who are fleecing the American public. Giving hope to people in trouble is commendable, but knowingly spreading false cures and making millions off the gullible is reprehensible. I urge you to read this so that you or anyone you love may not be taken by the frauds and fakes in the irrational alternative medicine movement.

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell the truth." That quote by H. L. Mencken accounts for much of the negative reaction to this fine compilation of medical quackery. The information in it has aged well; only some of the sales and marketing trends data have begun to go out of date.

It's a depressing tale, reading how quacks prey upon the ignorant. Desperate people are not skeptical people, so the svengalis adroitly use auto-suggestion, nature taking its course, and sheer chance to bolster their claims of wonder-working. A little appeal to paranoia helps, too: "The big bad meanie drug companies don't *want* you to have this _special_ treatment!"

The durability of quack remedies is well illustrated in the treatment here of chiropractic. The physiological basis for the central claim of chiropractic, "subluxation", has been debunked time and again. But facts are no match for marketing. "Chiropractic WORKS! Chiropractic WORKS! It WORKS! It WORKS! It WORKS!" is dinned into the public in response to criticism. And its popularity is higher than ever now.

What's extra-bemusing is how all these backwoods remedies and crank therapies have not only come into vogue in recent decades, but that they have acquired cachet. Things like herbalism, chiropractic, magnetotherapy, and such are now yuppie lifestyle accessories, even being pitched by famous author-physicians on public televsion. Author Stephen Barrett has a very good website about medical quackery, but given the credulity and scientific ignorance of the general public, his is quite an uphill battle. Sound medical advice, with its inevitable grey areas, equivocations, and responsible aversion to blanket generalizations, is frequently outshone by the upbeat flummery and soothing lies of the quack. But, if the reader is prepared to think critically about the allure of the quasi-medical fads popular today, this book is as good a nonsense detector as there is available today.

Please, if you're finding yourself sucked in by the deceptive advertising, false promises, and outright lies of the despicable method of thievery called alternative medicine, stop right now and read this book. You have nothing to lose -- whereas if you stick with the quacks you're likely to lose thousands of dollars and maybe your life.

And no, I have nothing to do with the AMA (whatever that is) or traditional medicine. I just know fraud when I see it.

Barrett just demolishes the quacks here with competent science--chiropractic, homeopathic, naturopathic--all treatments without a shred of scientific evidence to back them up.

Look at some of the negative reviews on the page, obviously written by practitioners in these fradulent fields threatened by Barrett's exposure of their scams! They are hilarious!Barrett is a well-respected M.D. who has been a quack watch dog for a long time now, and anyone with any common sense should read this book.

This book albeit having interesting information on quackery, which believe me does exist to some form in all professions whether it alternative or mainstream medicine, comes short of nothing more than a way for Dr. Barret to push his agenda.

I think that if you want to purchase this book you should also check into the credentials of the author and see his long history of biasness. Do a search on the web under Dr Stephen Barrett and also check into the findings in New Zealand concerning him, and you just might be surprised at what you find.

All of Steven Barretts books are heavily biased, and extremely under researched. If Mr. Barrett could publish a manuscript in any of the leading peer-reviewed spinal journals, discussing spinal biomechanics, articular neurology, and/or bio-neuro-mechanical principles, I might listen to what he has to say.

Mr. Barrett holds no authority to discuss contemporary Chiropractic and its fundamental principles. If his books were truly objective He would refer his readers to the scientific journals in which Chiropractic has published many papers. ie, SPINE--The #1 Journal in the world, as well as many others.

After reading this book, it is so obvious that the author/s know nothing about chiropractic. Have they ever even been treated by a chiropractor? It is also not very professional for one doctor to condemn another. I am an orthopaedic surgeon and I refer many of my patients to be treated by a chiroractor before the final choice of surgery. After giving a lecture at a chiropractic college in Japan, I was amazed that the doctors know as much about my job as I do! But how much does the author know about chiropractic? It is books like this that keeps modern medicine in the dark ages. Some doctors are even ignorant about the fact that HIV is the cause of AIDS! I have a copy of this book at home which I bought for 5 Dollars in a second hand book shop; if anybody wants a good laugh at a doctors ignorance, you can have mine for a buck!

Dr. Barrett issues venom upon ANYTHING he considers alternative medicine to gain public attention and this book is no exception. If you see government plots underneath your pillow, then this paranoid peice of misinformation will be right up your alley. For the rest of you, check more reputable sources. Webmd.com, for example, is building a relatively large database of articles on alternative health care.